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object:Liber 46 - The Key of the Mysteries
author class:Eliphas Levi
class:book
class:chapter
            (LA CLEF DES GRANDS MYSTERES)
                   BY
                ELIPHAS LEVI

             THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES
                 ACCORDING TO
           ENOCH, ABRAHAM, HERMES TRISMEGISTES
                 AND SOLOMON
                   BY
                ELIPHAS LEVI
      TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALEISTER CROWLEY

"Religion says: --- Believe and you will understand. Science comes to
say to you: --- Understand and you will believe.
"At that moment the whole of science will change front; the spirit, so
long dethroned and forgotten, will take its ancient place; it will be
demonstrated that the old traditions are all true, that the whole of
paganism is only a system of corrupted and misplaced truths, that it is
sufficient to cleanse them, so to say, and to put them back again in
their place, to see them shine with all their rays. In a word, all
ideas will change, and since on all sides a multitude of the elect cry
in concert, Come, Lord, come! why should you blame the men who throw
themselves forward into that majestic future, and pride themselves on
having foreseen it?"
(J. De Maistre, "Soirees de St. Petersbourg.")


TRANSLATORS NOTE
IN the biographical and critical essay which Mr. Waite prefixes to his
"Mysteries of Magic" he says: "A word must be added of the method of
this digest, which claims to be something more than translation and has
been infinitely more laborious. I believe it to be in all respects
faithful, and where it has been necessary or possible for it to be
literal, there also it is invariably literal."
We agree that it is either more or less than translation, and the
following examples selected at hazard in the course of half-an-hour
will enable the reader to judge whether Mr. Waite is acquainted with
either French or English:
"Gentilhomme" --- "Gentleman."
"The nameless vice which was reproached "against" the Templars."
"Certaines circonstances ridicules et un proces en escroquerie" ---
"Certain ridiculous processes and a swindling lawsuit."
"Se mele de dogmatiser" --- "Meddles with dogmatism."
"La vie pour lui suffisait a lexpiation des plus grands crimes, puis
quelle etait la consequence dun arret de mort" --- "According to him
life was sufficient for the greatest crimes, since "these" were the
result of a death sentence."
"Vos meilleurs amis ont du concevoir des inquietudes" --- "Your best
friends have been reasonably anxious." (The mistranslation here turns
the speech into an insult.) {v}
   "Sacro-sainte" --- "Sacred and saintly."
   "Auriculaire" --- "Index."
"Navez vous pas obtenu tout ce que vous demandiez, et plus que vous ne
demandiez, car vous ne maviez pas parle dargent?" --- "Have you not
had all and more than you wanted, and there has been no question of
remuneration?" (This mistranslation makes nonsense of the whole
passage.)
   "Eliphas netait pas a la question" --- "Eliphas was not under
   cross- examination."
   "Mauvais plaisant" --- "Vicious jester."
   "Si vous naviez pas ... vous deviendriez" --- "If you have not ...
   you may become." (This mistranslation turns a compliment into an
   insult.)
   "An awful and ineffaceable tableaux."
   "Peripeties" --- "Circumstances."
   "Il avait fait partie du clerge de Saint Germain lAuxerrois" ---
   "He was of the Society of St. Germain lAuxerrois."
   "Bruit de tempete" --- "Stormy sound."
We are obliged to mention this matter, as Mr. Waite (by persistent
self- assertion) has obtained the reputation of being trustworthy as an
editor. On the contrary, he not only mutilates and distorts his
authors, but, as demonstrated above, he is totally incapable of
understanding their simplest phrases and even their commonest words.
{vi}


INTRODUCTION
THIS volume represents the high-water mark of the thought of Eliphas
Levi. It may be regarded as written by him as his Thesis for the Grade
of Exempt Adept, just as his "Ritual and Dogma" was his Thesis for the
grade of a Major Adept. He is, in fact, no longer talking of things as
if their sense was fixed and universal. He is beginning to see
something of the contradiction inherent in the nature of things, or at
any rate, he constantly illustrates the fact that the planes are to be
kept separate for practical purposes, although in the final analysis
they turn out to be one. This, and the extraordinarily subtle and
delicate irony of which Eliphas Levi is one of the greatest masters
that has ever lived, have baffled the pedantry and stupidity of such
commentators as Waite. English has hardly a word to express the mental
condition of such unfortunates. "Dummheit," in its strongest German
sense, is about the nearest thing to it. It is as if a geographer
should criticize "Gullivers Travels" from his own particular
standpoint.
When Levi says that all that he asserts as an initiate is subordinate
to his humble submissiveness as a Christian, and then not only remarks
that the Bible and the Quran are different translations of the same
book, but treats the Incarnation as an allegory, it is evident that a
good deal of submission will be required. When he agrees with St.
Augustine that a thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills
it because it is just, he sees perfectly well that he is reducing God
to a poetic image reflected from his own moral {vii} ideal of justice,
and no amount of alleged orthodoxy can weigh against that statement.
His very defence of the Catholic Hierarchy is a masterpiece of that
peculiar form of conscious sophistry which justifies itself by reducing
its conclusion to zero. One must begin with "one," and that "one" has
no particular qualities. Therefore, so long as you have an authority
properly centralized it does not really matter what that authority is.
In the Pope we have such an authority ready made, and it is the gravest
tactical blunder to endeavour to set up an authority opposed to him.
Success in doing so means war, and failure anarchy. This, however, did
not prevent Levi from ceremonially casting a papal crown to the ground
and crying "Death to tyranny and superstition!" in the bosom of a
certain secret Areopagus of which he was the most famous member.
When a man becomes a magician he looks about him for a magical weapon;
and, being probably endowed with that human frailty called laziness, he
hopes to find a weapon ready made. Thus we find the Christian Magus who
imposed his power upon the world taking the existing worships and
making a single system combining all their merits. There is no single
feature in Christianity which has not been taken bodily from the
worship of Isis, or of Mithras, or of Bacchus, or of Adonis, or of
Osiris. In modern times again we find Frater Iehi Aour trying to handle
Buddhism. Others again have attempted to use Freemasonry. There have
been even exceptionally foolish magicians who have tried to use a sword
long since rusted.
Wagner illustrates this point very clearly in "Siegfried." The Great
Sword Nothung has been broken, and it is the {viii} only weapon that
can destroy the gods. The dwarf Mime tries uselessly to mend it. When
Siegfried comes he makes no such error. He melts its fragments and
forges a new sword. In spite of the intense labour which this costs, it
is the best plan to adopt.
Levi completely failed to capture Catholicism; and his hope of using
Imperialism, his endeavour to persuade the Emperor that he was the
chosen instrument of the Almighty, a belief which would have enabled
him to play Maximus to little Napoleons Julian, was shattered once for
all at Sedan.
It is necessary for the reader to gain this clear conception of Levis
inmost mind, if he is to reconcile the "contradictions" which leave
Waite petulant and bewildered. It is the sad privilege of the higher
order of mind to be able to see both sides of every question, and to
appreciate the fact that both are equally tenable. Such contradictions
can, of course, only be reconciled on a higher plane, and this method
of harmonizing contradictions is, therefore, the best key to the higher
planes.
It seems unnecessary to add anything to these few remarks. This is the
only difficulty in the whole book, though in one or two passages Levis
extraordinarily keen sense of humour leads him to indulge in a little
harmless bombast. We may instance his remarks on the "Grimoire" of
Honorius.
We have said that this is the masterpiece of Levi. He reaches an
exaltation of both thought and language which is equal to that of any
other writer known to us. Once it is understood that it is purely a
thesis for the Grade of Exempt Adept, the reader should have no further
difficulty. --- A. C. {ix}


PREFACE
On the brink of mystery, the spirit of man is seized with giddiness.
Mystery is the abyss which ceaselessly attracts our unquiet curiosity
by the terror of its depth.
The greatest mystery of the infinite is the existence of Him for whom
alone all is without mystery.
Comprehending the infinite which is essentially incomprehensible, He is
Himself that infinite and eternally unfathomable mystery; that is to
say, that He is, in all seeming, that supreme absurdity in which
Tertullian believed.
Necessarily absurd, since reason must renounce for ever the project of
attaining to Him; necessarily credible, since science and reason, far
from demonstrating that He does not exist, are dragged by the chariot
of fatality to believe that He does exist, and to adore Him themselves
with closed eyes.
Why? --- Because this Absurd is the infinite source of reason. The
light springs eternally from the eternal shadows. Science, that Babel
Tower of the spirit, may twist and coil its spirals ever ascending as
it will; it may make the earth tremble, it will never touch the sky.
God is He whom we shall eternally learn to know better, and,
consequently, He whom we shall never know entirely.
The realm of mystery is, then, a field open to the conquests of the
intelligence. March there as boldly as you will, never will you
diminish its extent; you will only alter {xi} its horizons. To know all
is an impossible dream; but woe unto him who dares not to learn all,
and who does not know that, in order to know anything, one must learn
eternally!
They say that in order to learn anything well, one must forget it
several times. The world has followed this method. Everything which is
to-day debateable had been solved by the ancients. Before our annals
began, their solutions, written in hieroglyphs, had already no longer
any meaning for us. A man has rediscovered their key; he has opened the
cemeteries of ancient science, and he gives to his century a whole
world of forgotten theorems, of syntheses as simple and sublime as
nature, radiating always from unity, and multiplying themselves like
numbers with proportions so exact, that the known demonstrates and
reveals the unknown. To understand this science, is to see God. The
author of this book, as he finishes his work, will think that he has
demonstrated it.
Then, when you have seen God, the hierophant will say to you: --- "Turn
round!" and, in the shadow which you throw in the presence of this sun
of intelligences, there will appear to you the devil, that black
phantom which you see when your gaze is not fixed upon God, and when
you think that your shadow fills the sky, --- for the vapours of the
earth, the higher they go, seem to magnify it more and more.
To harmonize in the category of religion science with revelation and
reason with faith, to demonstrate in philosophy the absolute principles
which reconcile all the antinomies, and finally to reveal the universal
equilibrium of natural forces, is the triple object of this work, which
will consequently be divided into three parts. {xii}
We shall exhibit true religion with such characters, that no one,
believer or unbeliever, can fail to recognize it; that will be the
absolute in religion. We shall establish in philosophy the immutable
characters of that Truth, which is in science, "reality;" in judgment,
"reason;" and in ethics, "justice." Finally, we shall acquaint you with
the laws of Nature, whose equilibrium is stability, and we shall show
how vain are the phantasies of our imagination before the fertile
realities of movement and of life. We shall also invite the great poets
of the future to create once more the divine comedy, no longer
according to the dreams of man, but according to the mathematics of
God.
Mysteries of other worlds, hidden forces, strange revelations,
mysterious illnesses, exceptional faculties, spirits, apparitions,
magical paradoxes, hermetic arcana, we shall say all, and we shall
explain all. Who has given us this power? We do not fear to reveal it
to our readers.
There exists an occult and sacred alphabet which the Hebrews attri bute
to Enoch, the Egyptians to Thoth or to Hermes Trismegistus, the Greeks
to Cadmus and to Palamedes. This alphabet was known to the followers of
Pythagoras, and is composed of absolute ideas attached to signs and
numbers; by its combinations, it realizes the mathematics of thought.
Solomon represented this alphabet by seventy-two names, written upon
thirty-six talismans. Eastern initiates still call these the "little
keys" or clavicles of Solomon. These keys are described, and their use
explained, in a book the source of whose traditional dogma is the
patriarch Abraham. This book is called the Sepher Yetzirah; with the
aid of the Sepher Yetzirah one can penetrate the {xiii} hidden sense of
the Zohar, the great dogmatic treatise of the Qabalah of the Hebrews.
The Clavicles of Solomon, forgotten in the course of time, and supposed
lost, have been rediscovered by ourselves; without trouble we have
opened all the doors of those old sanctuaries where absolute truth
seemed to sleep, --- always young, and always beautiful, like that
princess of the childish legend, who, during a century of slumber,
awaits the bridegroom whose mission it is to awaken her.
After our book, there will still be mysteries, but higher and farther
in the infinite depths. This publication is a light or a folly, a
mystification or a monument. Read, reflect, and judge.

{xiv}


THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES
(LA CLEF DES GRANDS MYSTERES)

BY
ELIPHAS LEVI

{xv}

PART I
RELIGIOUS MYSTERIES

PROBLEMS FOR SOLUTION
   I. --- To demonstrate in a certain and absolute manner the existence
   of God, and to give an idea of Him which will satisfy all minds.
   II. --- To establish the existence of a true religion in such a way
   as to render it incontestable.
   III. --- To indicate the bearing and the "raison detre" of all the
   mysteries of the one true and universal religion.
   IV. --- To turn the objections of philosophy into arguments
   favourable to true religion.
   V. --- To draw the boundary between religion and superstition, and
   to give the reason of miracles and prodigies.

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
WHEN Count Joseph de Maistre, that grand and passionate lover of Logic,
said despairingly, "The world is without religion," he resembled those
people who say rashly "There is no God."
The world, in truth, is without the religion of Count Joseph de
Maistre, as it is probable that such a God as the majority of atheists
conceive does not exist.
Religion is an idea based upon one constant and universal {1} fact; man
is a religious animal. The word "religion" has then a necessary and
absolute sense. Nature herself sanctifies the idea which this word
represents, and exalts it to the height of a principle.
The need of believing is closely linked with the need of loving; for
that reason our souls need communion in the same hopes and in the same
love. Isolated beliefs are only doubts: it is the bond of mutual
confidence which, by creating faith, composes religion.
Faith does not invent itself, does not impose itself, does not
establish itself by any political agreement; like life, it manifests
itself with a sort of fatality. The same power which directs the
phenomena of nature, extends and limits the supernatural domain of
faith, despite all human foresight. One does not imagine revelations;
one undergoes then, and one believes in them. In vain does the spirit
protest against the obscurities of dogma; it is subjugated by the
attraction of these very obscurities, and often the least docile of
reasoners would blush to accept the title of "irreligious man."
Religion holds a greater place among the realities of life than those
who do without religion --- or pretend to do without it --- affect to
believe. All ideas that raise man above the animal --- moral love,
devotion, honour --- are sentiments essentially religious. The cult of
the fatherl and and of the family, fidelity to an oath and to memory,

are things which humanity will never abjure without degrading itself
utterly, and which could never exist without the belief in something
greater than mortal life, with all its vicissitudes, its ignorance and
its misery.
If annihilation were the result of all our aspirations to {2} those
sublime things which we feel to be eternal, our only duties would be
the enjoyment of the present, forgetfulness of the past, and
carelessness about the future, and it would be rigorously true to say,
as a celebrated sophist once said, that the man who thinks is a
degraded animal.
Moreover, of all human passions, religious passion is the most powerful
and the most lively. It generates itself, whether by affirmation or
negation, with an equal fanaticism, some obstinately affirming the god
that they have made in their own image, the others denying God with
rashness, as if they had been able to understand and to lay waste by a
single thought all that world of infinity which pertains to His great
name.
Philosophers have not sufficiently considered the physiological fact of
religion in humanity, for in truth religion exists apart from all
dogmatic discussion. It is a faculty of the human soul just as much as
intelligence and love. While man exists, so will religion. Considered
in this light, it is nothing but the need of an infinite idealism, a
need which justifies every aspiration for progress, which inspires
every devotion, which alone prevents virtue and honour from being mere
words, serving to exploit the vanity of the weak and the foolish to the
profit of the strong and the clever.
It is to this innate need of belief that one might justly give the name
of natural religion; and all which tends to clip the wings of these
beliefs is, on the religious plane, in opposition to nature. The
essence of the object of religion is mystery, since faith begins with
the unknown, abandoning the rest to the investigations of science.
Doubt is, moreover, the mortal enemy of faith; faith feels that the
intervention of {3} the divine being is necessary to fill the abyss
which separates the finite from the infinite, and it affirms this
intervention with all the warmth of its heart, with all the docility of
its intelligence. If separated from this act of faith, the need of
religion finds no satisfaction, and turns to scepticism and to despair.
But in order that the act of faith should not be an act of folly,
reason wishes it to be directed and ruled. By what? By science? We have
seen that science can do nothing here. By the civil authority? It is
absurd. Are our prayers to be superintended by policemen?
There remains, then, moral authority, which alone is able to constitute
dogma and establish the discipline of worship, in concert this time
with the civil authority, but not in obedience to its orders. It is
necessary, in a word, that faith should give to the religious need a
real satisfaction, --- a satisfaction entire, permanent and
indubitable. To obtain that, it is necessary to have the absolute and
invariable affirmation of a dogma preserved by an authorized hierarchy.
It is necessary to have an efficacious cult, giving, with an absolute
faith, a substantial realization of the symbols of belief.
Religion thus understood being the only one which can satisfy the
natural need of religion, it must be the only really natural religion.
We arrive, without help from others, at this double definition, that
true natural religion is revealed religion. The true revealed religion
is the hierarchical and traditional religion, which affirms itself
absolutely, above human discussion, by communion in faith, hope, and
charity.
Representing the moral authority, and realizing it by the efficacy of
its ministry, the priesthood is as holy and infallible as humanity is
subject to vice and to error. The priest, {4} "qua" priest, is always
the representative of God. Of little account are the faults or even the
crimes of man. When Alexander VI consecrated his bishops, it was not
the poisoner who laid his hands upon them, it was the pope. Pope
Alexander VI never corrupted or falsified the dogmas which condemned
him, or the sacraments which in his hands saved others, and did not
justify him. At all times and in all places there have been liars and
criminals, but in the hierarchical and divinely authorized Church there
have never been, and there will never be, either bad popes or bad
priests. "Bad" and "priest" form an oxymoron.
We have mentioned Alexander VI, and we think that this name will be
sufficient without other memories as justly execrated as his being
brought up against us. Great criminals have been able to dishonour
themselves doubly because of the sacred character with which they were
invested, but they had not the power to dishonour that character, which
remains always radiant and splendid above fallen humanity.<
six legs. Definition. It is no answer to this to show that all dogs
have four. --- O.M.>>
We have said that there is no religion without mysteries; let us add
that there are no mysteries without symbols. The symbol, being the
formula or the expression of the mystery, only expresses its unknown
depth by paradoxical images borrowed from the known. The symbolic form,
having for its object to characterize what is above scientific reason,
should necessarily find itself without that reason: hence the
celebrated and perfectly just remark of a Father of the Church: "I
believe because it is absurd. Credo quia absurdum."
If science were to affirm what it did not know, it would {5} destroy
itself. Science will then never be able to perform the work of faith,
any more than faith can decide in a matter of science. An affirmation
of faith with which science is rash enough to meddle can then be
nothing but an absurdity for it, just as a scientific statement, if
given us as an article of faith, would be an absurdity on the religious
plane. To know and to believe are two terms which can never be
confounded.
It would be equally impossible to oppose the one to the other. It is
impossible, in fact, to believe the contrary of what one knows without
ceasing, for that very reason, to know it; and it is equally impossible
to achieve a knowledge contrary to what one believes without ceasing
immediately to believe.
To deny or even to contest the decisions of faith in the name of
science is to prove that one understands neither science nor faith: in
fine, the mystery of a God of three persons is not a problem of
mathematics; the incarnation of the Word is not a phenomenon in
obstetrics; the scheme of redemption stands apart from the criticism of
the historian. Science is absolutely powerless to decide whether we are
right or wrong in believing or disbelieving dogma; it can only observe
the results of belief, and if faith evidently improves men, if,
moreover, faith is in itself, considered as a physiological fact,
evidently a necessity and a force, science will certainly be obliged to
admit it, and take the wise part of always reckoning with it.
Let us now dare to affirm that there exists an immense fact equally
appreciable both by faith and science; a fact which makes God visible
(in a sense) upon earth; a fact incontestable and of universal bearing;
this fact is the manifestation in the world, beginning from the epoch
when the {6} Christian revelation was made, of a spirit unknown to the
ancients, of a spirit evidently divine, more positive than science in
its works, in its aspirations, more magnificently ideal than the
highest poetry, a spirit for which it was necessary to create a new
name, a name altogether unheard<
against the time when Paul should give it a meaning. --- O.M.>> in the
sanctuaries of antiquity. This name was created, and we shall
demonstrate that this name, this word, is, in religion, as much for
science as for faith, the expression of the absolute. The word is
CHARITY, and the spirit of which we speak is the "spirit of charity."
Before charity, faith prostrates itself, and conquered science bows.
There is here evidently something greater than humanity; charity proves
by its works that it is not a dream. It is stronger than all the
passions; it triumphs over suffering and over death; it makes God
understood by every heart, and seems already to fill eternity by the
begun realization of its legitimate hopes.
Before charity alive and in action who is the Proudhon who dares
blaspheme? Who is the Voltaire who dares laugh?
Pile one upon the other the sophisms of Diderot, the critical arguments
of Strauss, the "Ruins" of Volney, so well named, for this man could
make nothing but "ruins," the blasphemies of the revolution whose voice
was extinguished once in blood, and once again in the silence of
contempt; join to it all that the future may hold for us of
monstrosities and of vain dreams; then will there come the humblest and
the simplest of all sisters of charity, --- the world will leave there
all its follies, and all its crimes, and all its dreams, to bow before
this sublime reality. {7}
Charity! word divine, sole word which makes God understood, word which
contains a universal revelation! "Spirit" of "charity," alliance of two
words, which are a complete solution and a complete promise! To what
question, in fine, do these two words not find an answer?
What is God for us, if not the spirit of charity? What is orthodoxy? Is
it not the spirit of charity which refuses to discuss faith lest it
should trouble the confidence of simple souls, and disturb the peace of
universal communion?<
lie will serve, provided every one acquiesces in it," and reprehends
Christianity for disturbing the peace of Paganism. "Or," indicates that
Christianity is but syncretic-eclectic Paganism, and defends it on this
ground. --- O.M.>> And the universal church, is it any other thing than
a communion in the spirit of charity? It is by the spirit of charity
that the church is infallible. It is the spirit of charity which is the
divine virtue of the priesthood.
Duty of man, guarantee of his rights, proof of his immortality,
eternity of happiness commencing for him upon the earth, glorious aim
given to his existence, goal and path of all his struggles, perfection
of his individual, civil and religious morality, the spirit of charity
understands all, and is able to hope all, undertake all, and accomplish
all.
It is by the spirit of charity that Jesus expiring on the cross gave a
son to His mother in the person of St. John, and, triumphing over the
anguish of the most frightful torture, gave a cry of deliverance and of
salvation, saying, "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!"
It is by charity that twelve Galilean artisans conquered the world;
they loved truth more than life, and they went without followers to
speak it to peoples and to kings; tested by torture, {8} they were
found faithful. They showed to the multitude a living immortality in
their death, and they watered the earth with a blood whose heat could
not be extinguished, because they were burning with the ardours of
charity.
It is by charity that the Apostles built up their Creed. They said that
to believe together was worth more than to doubt separately; they
constituted the hierarchy on the basis of obedience --- rendered so
noble and so great by the spirit of charity, that to serve in this
manner is to reign; they formulated the faith of all and the hope of
all, and they put this Creed in the keeping of the charity of all. Woe
to the egoist who appropriates to himself a single word of this
inheritance of the Word; he is a deicide, who wishes to dismember the
body of the Lord.
This creed is the holy ark of charity; whoso touches it is stricken by
eternal death, for charity withdraws itself from him. It is the sacred
inheritance of our children, it is the price of the blood of our
fathers!
It is by charity that the martyrs took consolation in the prisons of
the Caesars, and won over to their belief even their warders and their
executioners.
It is in the name of charity that St. Martin of Tours protested against
the torture of the Priscillians,<
disturbing the Church, especially in Spain. The Emperor Maximus, a
Spaniard, was inclined to put it down with a strong hand and confiscate
the heretics property. The Gallic clergy hounded him on, and the
Councils of Bordeaux and Saragossa encouraged him. Two Spanish priests,
"Ithacus" and "Idacus," clamoured for the heretics punishment by the
secular arm. But St. Martin of Tours, stalwart champion of orthodoxy as
he was, resisted, and in 385 he went to Treves to plead for the
persecuted Priscillianists. He prevailed. So long as Martin stayed at
court the Ithacan party was foiled. When he left they had the upper
hand again, and Maximus gave the suppression of the heretics into the
hands of the unrelenting Evodious. Priscillian was killed. Exile and
death were the fate of his followers. Heresy blazed the stronger, and a
worse persecution was threatened. Then St. Martin left his cell at
Marmontier, and set out a second time to Treves. News of the old man
coming along the road on his ass reached his enemies. They met him at
the gate and refused him entrance. "But," said Martin, "I come with the
peace of Jesus Christ." And such was the power of this presence that
they could not close the city gates against him. But the palace doors
were closed. Martin refused to see the Ithacans or to receive the
Communion with them, and their fury at this is eloquent testimony of
their sense of his power. They appealed to Maximus, who delivered over
Martin bound to them. But in the night Maximus sent for Martin, argued,
coaxed, persuaded him to compromise. The schism would be great, he
persisted, if Martin continued to exasperate the Ithacans. Martin said
he had nothing to do with persecutors. In wrath the Emperor let him go,
and gave orders to the Tribunes to depart to Spain and carry out a
rigorous Inquisition. Then Martin returned to Maximus and bargained.
Let this order be revoked, and he would receive Communion with the
Ithacans next day at the election of the new Archbishop. The order was
revoked, and Martin kept his word. But when he knew the cause of
Humanity safe, he departed, and on his way back to Tours experienced a
great agony. Why had he had dealings with the Ithacans? In a lonely
place he pondered sadly. An angel spoke to him. "Martin, you do right
to be sad, but it was the only way." Never again did he go to any
council. He was wont to say with tears that if he had saved the
heretics he himself had lost power over men and over demons.
They have outraged the meaning of the episode who explain Martins
protest as merely against the surrender of the Church to Secular Power.
It was "lese-humanite" of which he held the Ithacans guilty.
St. Martin of Tours was often called Martin the Thaumaturgist. He was
noted for his power over animals.>> and separated {9} himself from the
communion of the tyrant who wished to impose faith by the sword.
It is by charity that so great a crowd of saints have forced the world
to accept them as expiation for the crimes committed in the name of
religion itself, and the scandals of the profaned sanctuary.
It is by charity that St. Vincent de Paul and Fenelon compelled the
admiration of even the most impious centuries, and quelled in advance
the laughter of the children of Voltaire before the imposing dignity of
their virtues. 10}
It is by charity, finally, that the folly of the cross has become the
wisdom of the nations, because every noble heart has understood that it
is greater to believe with those who love, and who devote themselves,
than to doubt with the egotists and with the slaves of pleasure. {11}


FIRST ARTICLE
SOLUTION OF THE FIRST PROBLEM

THE TRUE GOD
GOD can only be defined by faith; science can neither deny nor affirm
that He exists.
God is the absolute object of human faith. In the infinite, He is the
supreme and creative intelligence of order. In the world, He is the
spirit of charity.
Is the Universal Being a fatal machine which eternally grinds down
intelligences by chance, or a providential intelligence which directs
forces in order to ameliorate minds?
   The first hypothesis is repugnant to reason; it is pessimistic and
   immoral.
   Science and reason ought then to accept the second.
   Yes, Proudhon, God is an hypothesis, but an hypothesis so necessary,
   that without it, all theorems become absurd or doubtful.
   For initiates of the Qabalah, God is the absolute unity which
   creates and animates numbers.
   The unity of the human intelligence demonstrates the unity of God.
The key of numbers is that of creeds, because signs are {12} analogical
figures of the harmony which proceeds from numbers.
Mathematics could never demonstrate blind fatality, because they are
the expression of the exactitude which is the character of the highest
reason.
Unity demonstrates the analogy of contraries; it is the foundation, the
equilibrium, and the end of numbers. The act of faith starts from
unity, and returns to unity.
{Illustration on page 13 described:
This is titled below: "THE SIGN OF THE GRAND ARCANUM G.. A.."
The figure is contained within a rectangle of width about half height.
The main element is a circle, bottom half shaded, pierced through on
the vertical diameter from below by a vertical sword or baton. The
"sword" has a right hand holding the pommel below, issuing from a cloud
to lower right. The hilt is not evident simply, but suggested by two
tails of serpents crossing just below the lower limit of the circle. To
either side of the pommel beneath the snake tails are the letters "FIN"
to left and "AL" to right. The point of the sword above the upper limit
of the circle is buttoned by a fleur-de-lis. The two serpents are
entwined about the sword to form a caduceus with two circles vertically
circumscribed within the greater circle. These serpents are billed.
There are two shaded bands on the two horizontal diameters of the
serpent circles. Five Hebrew letters are along the sword, only the
topmost upon the blade and the others beneath: Top quarter --- HB:Yod ,
next quarter --- HB:Aleph , center --- HB:Shin , next quarter is
probably but not certainly HB:Mem , bottom quarter is an inverted

HB:Heh . The upper half of the upper serpent circle has
Aleph-Heh-Yod-Heh just above the diameter bar, and the lower quarter of
the lower serpent circle has the same inverted just below the diameter
bar. There is an "X" of
thin line diameters across the large circle. At the horizontal diameter
of the large circle, just above to the left "THROSNE" and to the right
"DE JVSTICE". Oriented about the circle to be read from the center are
the following words: At left outside "COVRONNE", at top and split "MED"
"IATE", at right "ECLESIASTIQVE", at bottom and split "DIR" "ECTE". Two
words in italics extend just above the horizontal diameter in invisible
extensis and through the rectangle: to left "HARMONIE", to right
"CEELESTE". Above the button of the sword is a small circle, and to the
left of that "Tzaddi-Dalet-Qof", to the right "Peh-Lamed-Kophfinal"
(possibly "Mem-Lamed-Kophfinal" or "Samekh-Lamed-Kophfinal"). Below
this, interrupted by the button are two texts: to the right:
"(?)Aleph-Samekh-Peh-Kophfinal Bet-Shin-Vau-Shin-Nunfinal
Heh-Bet-Yod-Resh " (First word doubtful, text referred to Dan. 8, where
it must be altered from Dan. 8, 2: "Vau-Aleph-Nun-Yod
Bet-Shin-Vau-Shin-Nunfinal Heh-Bet-Yod-Resh-Heh" "I was in Shushan
castle". This variant could be translated as "sheath in Shushan
castle".) Beneath this: "DANIEL ch. 8." The text to the left cannot be
rendered accurately owing to similarity of letter shapes and no direct
bearing to the text cited. It looks like:
"Aleph-Taw-Tet-Dalet-Resh-Vau-Shin Samekh-Resh-Vau-Koph-Yod", but that
is not likely to be even close. Beneath this is the citation "Nehemie
ch.1 v.1" which does not contain any part of this versicle, but which
does mention the castle at Shusah, cited in the versicle to the right.
Possibly the whole thing is a continuation of a paraphrase of Daniel 8,
2, with the text unclear because of letter shapes poorly written.
Lastly, to the left outside of the upper serpent circle: "SENS"; and to
the right inside the same: "RASON" --- both oriented to be read from
the center.} {13}
We shall now sketch out an explanation of the Bible by the aid of
numbers, for the Bible is the book of the images of God.
We shall ask numbers to give us the reason of the dogmas of eternal
religion; numbers will always reply by reuniting themselves in the
synthesis of unity.
The following pages are simply outlines of qabalistic hypotheses; they
stand apart from faith, and we indicate them only as curiosities of
research. It is no part of our task to make innovations in dogma, and
what we assert in our character as an initiate is entirely subordinate
to our submission in our character as a Christian.<
typical of the sublime irony of Levi, and the key to the whole of his
paradoxes. --- TRANS.>>

SKETCH OF THE PROPHETIC THEOLOGY
OF NUMBERS
I
UNITY
UNITY is the principle and the synthesis of numbers; it is the idea of
God and of man; it is the alliance of reason and of faith.
Faith cannot be opposed to reason; it is made necessary by love, it is
identical with hope. To love is to believe and hope; and this triple
outburst of the soul is called virtue, because, in order to make it,
courage is necessary. But would there be any courage in that, if doubt
were not possible? Now, to be able to doubt, is to doubt. Doubt is the
force {14} which balances faith, and it constitutes the whole merit of
faith.
Nature herself induces us to believe; but the formulae of faith are
social expressions of the tendencies of faith at a given epoch. It is
that which proves the Church to be infallible, evidentially and in
fact.
God is necessarily the most unknown of all beings because He is only
defined by negative experience; He is all that we are not, He is the
infinite opposed to the finite by hypothesis.
Faith, and consequently hope and love, are so free that man, far from
being able to impose them on others, does not even impose them on
himself.
"These," says religion, "are graces." Now, is it conceivable that grace
should be subject to demand or exaction; that is to say, could any one
wish to force men to a thing which comes freely and without price from
heaven? One must not do more than desire it for them.
To reason concerning faith is to think irrationally, since the object
of faith is outside the universe of reason. If one asks me: --- "Is
there a God?" I reply, "I believe it." "But are you sure of it?" ---
"If I were sure of it, I should not believe it, I should know it."
The formulation of faith is to agree upon the terms of the common
hypothesis.
Faith begins where science ends. To enlarge the scope of science is
apparently to diminish that of faith; but in reality, it is to enlarge
it in equal proportion, for it is to amplify its base.
One can only define the unknown by its supposed and supposable
relations with the known. {15}
Analogy was the sole dogma of the ancient magi. This dogma may indeed
be called "mediator," for it is half scientific, half hypothetical;
half reason, and half poetry. This dogma has been, and will always be,
the father of all others.
What is the Man-God? He who realizes, in the most human life, the most
divine ideal.
Faith is a divination of intelligence and of love, when these are
directed by the pointings of nature and of reason.
It is then of the essence of the things of faith to be inaccessible to
science, doubtful for philosophy, and undefined for certainty.
Faith is an hypothetical realization and a conventional determination
of the last aims of hope. It is the attachment to the visible sign of
the things which one does not see.
"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen."
To affirm without folly that God is or that He is not, one must begin
with a reasonable or unreasonable definition of God. Now, this
definition, in order to be reasonable, must be hypothetical,
analogical, and the negation of the known finite. It is possible to
deny a particular God, but the absolute God can no more be denied than
He can be proved; He is a reasonable supposition in whom one believes.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," said the
Master; to see with the heart is to believe; and if this faith is
attached to the true good, it can never be deceived, provided that it
does not seek to define too much in accordance with the dangerous
inductions which spring from personal ignorance. Our judgments in
questions of faith apply to {16} ourselves; it will be done to us as we
have believed; that is to say, we create ourselves in the image of our
ideal.
"Those who make their gods become like unto them," says the psalmist,
"and all they that put their trust in them."
The divine ideal of the ancient world made the civilization which came
to an end, and one must not despair of seeing the god of our barbarous
fathers become the devil of our more enlightened children. One makes
devils with cast-off gods,<
already become the devil to such thinkers as Nietzsche and Crowley.
--- O.M.>> and Satan is only so incoherent and so formless because he
is made up of all the rags of ancient theogonies. He is the sphinx
without a secret, the riddle without an answer, the mystery without
truth, the absolute without reality and without light.
Man is the son of God because God, manifested, realized, and incarnated
upon earth, called Himself the Son of man.
It is after having made God in the image of His intelligence and of His
love, that humanity has understood the sublime Word who said "Let there
be light!"
   Man is the form of the divine thought, and God is the idealized
   synthesis of human thought.
   Thus the Word of God reveals man, and the Word of man reveals God.
   Man is the God of the world, and God is the man of heaven.
   Before saying "God wills," man has willed.
   In order to understand and honour Almighty God, man must first be
   free.
Had he obeyed and abstained from the fruit of the tree of knowledge
through fear, man would have been innocent and {17} stupid as the lamb,
sceptical and rebellious as the angel of light. He himself cut the
umbilical cord of his simplicity, and, falling free upon the earth,
dragged God with him in his fall.
And therefore, from this sublime fall, he rises again glorious, with
the great convict of Calvary, and enters with Him into the kingdom of
heaven.
For the kingdom of heaven belongs to intelligence and love, both
children of liberty.
God has shown liberty to man in the image of a lovely woman, and in
order to test his courage, He made the phantom of death pass between
her and him.
Man loved, and felt himself to be God; he gave for her what God had
just bestowed upon him --- eternal hope.
   He leapt towards his bride across the shadow of death.
   Man possessed liberty; he had embraced life.
   Expiate now thy glory, O Prometheus!
   Thy heart, ceaselessly devoured, cannot die; it is thy vulture, it
   is Jupiter, who will die!
One day we shall awake at last from the painful dreams of a tormented
life; our ordeal will be finished, and we shall be sufficiently strong
against sorrow to be immortal.
Then we shall live in God with a more abundant life, and we shall
descend into His works with the light of His thought, we shall be borne
away into the infinite by the whisper of His love.
We shall be without doubt the elder brethren of a new race, the angels
of posterity.
Celestial messengers, we shall wander in immensity, and the stars will
be our gleaming ships. {18}
We shall transform ourselves into sweet visions to calm weeping eyes;
we shall gather radiant lilies in unknown meadows, and we shall scatter
their dew upon the earth.
We shall touch the eyelid of the sleeping child, and rejoice the heart
of its mother with the spectacle of the beauty of her well-beloved son!

II
THE BINARY
   THE binary is more particularly the number of woman, mate of man and
   mother of society.
   Man is love in intelligence; woman is intelligence in love.
   Woman is the smile of the Creator content with himself, and it is
   after making her that He rested, says the divine parable.
   Woman stands before man because she is mother, and all is forgiven
   her in advance, because she brings forth in sorrow.
Woman initiated herself first into immortality through death; then man
saw her to be so beautiful, and understood her to be so generous, that
he refused to survive her, and loved her more than his life, more than
his eternal happiness.
Happy outlaw, since she has been given to him as companion in his
exile!
But the children of Cain have revolted against the mother of Abel; they
have enslaved their mother.
The beauty of woman has become a prey for the brutality of such men as
cannot love.
Thus woman closed her heart as if it were a secret sanctuary, and said
to men unworthy of her: "I am virgin, {19} but I will to become mother,
and my son will teach you to love me."
O Eve! Salutation and adoration in thy fall!
O Mary! Blessings and adoration in thy sufferings and in thy glory!
Crucified and holy one who didst survive thy God that thou mightst bury
thy son, be thou for us the final word of the divine revelation!
Moses called God "Lord"; Jesus called Him "My Father," and we, thinking
of thee, may say to Providence, "You are our mother."
   Children of woman, let us forgive fallen woman!
   Children of woman, let us adore regenerate woman!
   Children of woman, who have slept upon her breast, been cradled in
   her arms, and consoled by her caresses, let us love her, and let us
   love each other!

III
THE TERNARY
   THE Ternary is the number of creation.
   God creates Himself eternally, and the infinite which He fills with
   His works is an incessant and infinite creation.
   Supreme love contemplates itself in beauty as in a mirror, and It
   essays all forms as adornments, for It is the lover of life.
Man also affirms himself and creates himself; he adorns himself with
his trophies of victory, he enlightens himself with his own
conceptions, he clothes himself with his works as with a wedding
garment. {20}
The great week of creation has been imitated by human genius, divining
the forms of nature.
Every day has furnished a new revelation, every new king of the world
has been for a day the image and the incarnation of God! Sublime dream
which explains the mysteries of India, and justifies all symbolisms!
The lofty conception of the man-God corresponds to the creation of
Adam, and Christianity, like the first days of man in the earthly
paradise, has been only an aspiration and a widowhood.
We wait for the worship of the bride and of the mother; we shall aspire
to the wedding of the New Covenant.
Then the poor, the blind, the outlaws of the old world will be invited
to the feast, and will receive a wedding garment. They will gaze the
one upon the other with inexpressible tenderness and a smile that is
ineffable because they have wept so long.

IV
THE QUATERNARY
THE Quaternary is the number of force. It is the ternary completed by
its product, the rebellious unity reconciled to the sovereign trinity.
In the first fury of life, man, having forgotten his mother, no longer
understood God but as an inflexible and jealous father.
The sombre Saturn, armed with his parricidal scythe, set himself to
devour his children.
Jupiter had eyebrows which shook Olympus; Jehovah wielded thunders
which deafened the solitudes of Sinai. {21}
Nevertheless, the father of men, being on occasion drunken like Noah,
let the world perceive the mysteries of life.
Psyche, made divine by her torments, became the bride of Eros; Adonis,
raised from death, found again his Venus in Olympus; Job, victorious
over evil, recovered more than he had lost.
The law is a test of courage.
To love life more than one fears the menaces of death is to merit life.
The elect are those who dare; woe to the timid!
Thus the slaves of law, who make themselves the tyrants of conscience
and the servants of fear, and those who begrudge that man should hope,
and the Pharisees of all the synagogues and of all the churches, are
those who receive the reproofs and the curses of the Father.
Was not the Christ excommunicated and crucified by the synagogue?
Was not Savonarola burned by the order of the sovereign pontiff of the
Christian religion?
Are not the Pharisees to-day just what they were in the time of
Caiaphas?
If any one speaks to them in the name of intelligence and love, will
they listen?
In rescuing the children of liberty from the tyranny of the Pharaohs,
Moses inaugurated the reign of the Father.
In breaking the insupportable yoke of mosaic pharisaism, Jesus welcomed
all men to the brotherhood of the only son of God.
When the last ideals fall, when the last material chains of conscience
break, when the last of them that killed the {22} prophets and the last
of them that stifled the Word are confounded, then will be the reign of
the Holy Ghost.
Then, Glory to the Father who drowned the host of Pharaoh in the Red
Sea!
Glory to the Son, who tore the veil of the temple, and whose cross,
overweighing the crown of the Caesars, broke the forehead of the
Caesars against the earth!
Glory to the Holy Ghost, who shall sweep from the earth by His terrible
breath all the thieves and all the executioners, to make room for the
banquet of the children of God!
Glory to the Holy Ghost, who has promised victory over earth and over
heaven to the angel of liberty!
The angel of liberty was born before the dawn of the first day, before
even the awakening of intelligence, and God called him the morning
star.
O Lucifer! Voluntarily and disdainfully thou didst detach thyself from
the heaven where the sun drowned thee in his splendour, to plow with
thine own rays the unworked fields of night!
Thou shinest when the sun sets, and thy sparkling gaze precedes the
daybreak!
Thou fallest to rise again; thou tastest of death to understand life
better!
For the ancient glories of the world, thou art the evening star; for
truth renascent, the lovely star of dawn.
Liberty is not licence, for licence is tyranny.
Liberty is the guardian of duty, because it reclaims right.<---
droit --- a word much in evidence at the time, with no true English
equivalent, save in such phrases as the right to work. By itself it
is only used in the plural, which will not do here, and throughout this
treatise. --- TRANS.>>
Lucifer, of whom the dark ages have made the genius of {23} evil, will
be truly the angel of light when, having conquered liberty at the price
of infamy, he will make use of it to submit himself to eternal order,
inaugurating thus the glories of voluntary obedience.
Right is only the root of duty; one must possess in order to give.
This is how a lofty and profound poetry explains the fall of the
angels.
God hath given to His spirits light and life; then He said to them:
"Love!"
"What is --- to love?" replied the spirits.
"To love is to give oneself to others," replied God. "Those who love
will suffer, but they will be loved."
"We have the right to give nothing, and we wish to suffer nothing,"
said the spirits, hating love.
"Remain in your right," answered God, "and let us separate! I and Mine
wish to suffer and even to die, to love. It is our duty!"
The fallen angel is then he who, from the beginning, refused to love;
he does not love, and that is his whole torture; he does not give, and
that is his poverty; he does not suffer, and that is his nothingness;
he does not die, and that is his exile.
The fallen angel is not Lucifer the light-bearer; it is Satan, who
calumniated love.
To be rich is to give; to give nothing is to be poor; to live is to
love; to love nothing is to be dead; to be happy is to devote oneself;
to exist only for oneself is to cast away oneself, and to exile oneself
in hell.
Heaven is the harmony of generous thoughts; hell is the conflict of
cowardly instincts. {24}
The man of right is Cain who kills Abel from envy; the man of duty is
Abel who dies for Cain for love.
   And such has been the mission of Christ, the great Abel of humanity.
   It is not for right that we should dare all, it is for duty.
   Duty is the expansion and the enjoyment of liberty; isolated right
   is the father of slavery.
   Duty is devotion; right is selfishness.
   Duty is sacrifice; right is theft and rapine.
   Duty is love, and right is hate.
   Duty is infinite life; right is eternal death.
   If one must fight to conquer right, it is only to acquire the power
   of duty: what use have we for freedom, unless to love and to devote
   ourselves to God?
   If one must break the law, it is when law imprisons love in fear.
   "He that saveth his life shall lose it," says the holy Book; "and he
   who consents to lose it will save it."
Duty is love; perish every obstacle to love! Silence, ye oracles of
hate! Destruction to the false gods of selfishness and fear! Shame to
the slaves, the misers of love!
God loves prodigal children!

V
THE QUINARY
THE Quinary is the number of religion, for it is the number of God
united to that of woman.<
woman-despiser. --- O.M.>> {25}
   Faith is not the stupid credulity of an awestruck ignorance.
   Faith is the consciousness and the confidence of Love.
   Faith is the cry of reason, which persists in denying the absurd,
   even in the presence of the unknown.
Faith is a sentiment necessary to the soul, just as breathing is to
life; it is the dignity of courage, and the reality of enthusiasm.
Faith does not consist of the affirmation of this symbol or that, but
of a genuine and constant aspiration towards the truths which are
veiled by all symbolisms.
If a man rejects an unworthy idea of divinity, breaks its false images,
revolts against hateful idolaters, you will call him an atheist!
The authors of the persecutions in fallen Rome called the first
Christians atheists, because they did not adore the idols of Caligula
or of Nero.
To deny a religion, even to deny all religions rather than adhere to
formulae which conscience rejects, is a courageous and sublime act of
faith. Every man who suffers for his convictions is a martyr of faith.
He explains himself badly, it may be, but he prefers justice and truth
to everything; do not condemn him without understanding him.
To believe in the supreme truth is not to define it, and to declare
that one believes in it is to recognize that one does not know it.
The Apostle St. Paul declares all faith contained in these two things:
--- To believe that God is, and that He rewards them who seek Him. {26}
Faith is a greater thing than all religions, because it states the
articles of belief with less precision.
Any dogma constitutes but a belief, and belongs to our particular
communion; faith is a sentiment which is common to the whole of
humanity.
The more one discusses with the object of obtaining greater accuracy,
the less one believes; every new dogma is a belief which a sect
appropriates to itself, and thus, in some sort, steals from universal
faith.
Let us leave sectarians to make and remake their dogmas; let us leave
the superstitious to detail and formulate their superstitions. As the
Master said, "Let the dead bury their dead!" Let us believe in the
indicible truth; let us believe in that Absolute which reason admits
without understanding it; let us believe in what we feel without
knowing it!
Let us believe in the supreme reason!
Let us believe in Infinite Love, and pity the stupidities of
scholasticism and the barbarities of false religion!
O man! Tell me what thou hopest, and I will tell thee what thou art
worth.
Thou dost pray, thou dost fast, thou dost keep vigil; dost thou then
believe that so thou wilt escape alone, or almost alone, from the
enormous ruin of mankind --- devoured by a jealous God? Thou art
impious, and a hypocrite.
Dost thou turn life into an orgie, and hope for the slumber of
nothingness? Thou art sick, and insensate.
Art thou ready to suffer as others and for others, and hope for the
salvation of all? Thou art a wise and just man.
   To hope is to fear not.
   To be afraid of God, what blasphemy! {27}
   The act of hope is prayer.
   Prayer is the flowering of the soul in eternal wisdom and in eternal
   love.
   It is the gaze of the spirit towards truth, and the sigh of the
   heart towards supreme beauty.
   It is the smile of the child upon its mother.
   It is the murmur of the lover, who reaches out towards the kisses of
   his mistress.
   It is the soft joy of a loving soul as it expands in an ocean of
   love.
   It is the sadness of the bride in the absence of the bridegroom.
   It is the sigh of the traveller who thinks of his fatherland.
   It is the thought of the poor man who works to support his wife and
   children.
Let us pray in silence; let us raise toward our unknown Father a look
of confidence and of love; let us accept with faith and resignation the
part which He assigns to us in the toils of life, and every throb of
our hearts will be a word of prayer!
Have we need to inform God of what we ask from Him? Does not He know
what is necessary for us?
If we weep, let us offer Him our tears; if we rejoice, let us turn
towards Him our smile; if He smite us, let us bow the head; if He
caress us, let us sleep within His arms!
Our prayer will be perfect, when we pray without knowing whom we pray.
Prayer is not a noise which strikes the ear; it is a silence which
penetrates the heart. {28}
Soft tears come to moisten the eyes, and sighs escape like incense
smoke.
One feels oneself in love, ineffably in love, with all that is beauty,
truth, and justice; one throbs with a new life, and one fears no more
to die. For prayer is the eternal life of intelligence and love; it is
the life of God upon earth.
Love one another --- that is the Law and the Prophets! Meditate, and
understand this word.
And when you have understood, read no more, seek no more, doubt no more
--- love!
Be no more wise, be no more learned --- love! That is the whole
doctrine of true religion; religion means charity, and God Himself is
only love.
   I have already said to you, to love is to give.
   The impious man is he who absorbs others.
   The pious man is he who loses himself in humanity.
If the heart of man concentrate in himself the fire with which God
animates it, it is a hell which devours all, and fills itself only with
ashes; if he radiates it without, it becomes a tender sun of love.
Man owes himself to his family; his family owes itself to the
fatherland; and the fatherl and to humanity.
The egoism of man merits isolation and despair; that of the family,
ruin and exile; that of the fatherland, war and invasion.
The man who isolates himself from every human love, saying, "I will
serve God," deceives himself. For, said St. John the Apostle, if he
loveth not his neighbour whom he hath see, how shall he love God whom
he hath not seen?
One must render to God that which is Gods, but one must not refuse
even to Caesar that which is Caesars. {29}
   God is He who gives life; Caesar can only give death.
   One must love God, and not fear Caesar; as it is written in the Holy
   Book, "He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword."
   You wish to be good? Then be just. You wish to be just? Then be
   free.
   The vices which make man like the brute are the first enemies of his
   liberty.
   Consider the drunkard, and tell me if this unclean brute can be
   called free!
   The miser curses the life of his father, and, like the crow, hungers
   for corpses.
The goal of the ambitious man is --- ruins; it is the delirium of envy!
The debauchee spits upon the breast of his mother, and fills with
abortions the entrails of death.
All these loveless hearts are punished by the most cruel of all
tortures, hate.
Because --- take it to heart! --- the expiation is implicit in the sin.
The man who does evil is like an ear then pot ill-made; he will break

himself: fatality wills it.
With the debris of the worlds, God makes stars; with the debris of
souls He makes angels.

VI
THE SENARY
THE Senary is the number of initiation by ordeal; it is the number of
equilibrium, it is the hieroglyph of the knowledge of Good and Evil.
{30}
He who seeks the origin of evil, seeks the source of what is not.
Evil is the disordered appetite of good, the unfruitful attempt of an
unskilful will.
Every one possesses the fruit of his work, and poverty is only the spur
to toil.
For the flock of men, suffering is like the shepherd dog, who bites the
wool of the sheep to put them back in the right way.
It is because of shadow that we are able to see light; because of cold
that we feel heat; because of pain that we are sensible to pleasure.
   Evil is then for us the occasion and the beginning of good.
   But, in the dreams of our imperfect intelligence, we accuse the work
   of Providence, through failing to understand it.
   We resemble the ignorant person who judges the picture by the
   beginning of the sketch, and says, when the head is done, "What! Has
   this figure no body?"
   Nature remains calm, and accomplishes its work.
   The ploughshare is not cruel when it tears the bosom of the earth,
   and the great revolutions of the world are the husbandry of God.
   There is a place for everything: to savage peoples, barbarous
   masters; to cattle, butchers; to men, judges and fathers.
   If time could change the sheep into lions, they would eat the
   butchers and the shepherds.
   Sheep never change because they do not instruct themselves; but
   peoples instruct themselves.
Shepherds and butchers of the people, you are then {31} right to regard
as your enemies those who speak to your flock!
Flocks who know yet only your shepherds, and who wish to remain
ignorant of their dealings with the butchers, it is excusable that you
should stone them who humiliate you and disturb you, in speaking to you
of your rights.
O Christ! The authorities condemn Thee, Thy disciples deny Thee, the
people curses Thee, and demands Thy murder; only Thy mother weeps for
Thee, even God abandons Thee!
"Eli! Eli! lama sabachthani!"

VII
THE SEPTENARY
THE Septenary is the great biblical number. It is the key of the
Creation in the books of Moses and the symbol of all religion. Moses
left five books, and the Law is complete in two testaments.
The Bible is not a history, it is a collection of poems, a book of
allegories and images.
Adam and Eve are only the primitive types of humanity; the tempter
serpent is time which tests; the Tree of Knowledge is right; the
expiation by toil is duty.
Cain and Abel represent the flesh and the spirit, force and
intelligence, violence and harmony.
The giants are those who usurped the earth in ancient times; the flood
was a great revolution.
The ark is tradition preserved in a family: religion at this period
becomes a mystery and the property of the race. Ham was cursed for
having revealed it. {32}
Nimrod and Babel are the two primitive allegories of the despot, and of
the universal empire which has always filled the dreams of men, --- a
dream whose fulfilment was sought successively by the Assyrians, the
Medes, the Persians, Alexander, Rome, Napoleon, the successors of Peter
the Great, and always unfinished because of the dispersion of
interests, symbolized by the confusion of tongues.
The universal empire could not realize itself by force, but by
intelligence and love. Thus, to Nimrod, the man of savage right, the
Bible opposed Abraham, the man of duty, who goes voluntarily into exile
in order to seek liberty and strife in a strange country, which he
seizes by virtue of his "Idea."
He has a sterile wife, his thought, and a fertile slave, his force; but
when force has produced its fruit, thought becomes fertile; and the son
of intelligence drives into exile the child of force. The man of
intelligence is submitted to rude tests; he must confirm his conquests
by sacrifices. God orders him to immolate his son, that is to say,
doubt ought to test dogma, and the intellectual man should be ready to
sacrifice everything on the altar of supreme reason. Then God
intervenes: universal reason yields to the efforts of labour, and shows
herself to science; the material side of dogma is alone immolated. .
This is the meaning of the ram caught by its horns in a thicket. The
history of Abraham is, then, a symbol in the ancient manner, and
contains a lofty revelation of the destinies of the human soul. Taken
literally, it is an absurd and revolting story. Did not St. Augustine
take literally the Golden Ass of Apuleius?
Poor great men! {33}
The history of Isaac is another legend. Rebecca is the type of the
oriental woman, laborious, hospitable, partial in her affections,
shrewd and wily in her manoeuvres. Jacob and Esau are again the two
types of Cain and Abel; but here Abel avenges himself: the emancipated
intelligence triumphs by cunning. The whole of the genius of the Jews
is in the character of Jacob, the patient and laborious supplanter who
yields to the wrath of Esau, becomes rich, and buys his brothers
forgiveness. One must never forget that, when the ancients want to
philosophize, they tell a story.
The history or legend of Joseph contains, in germ, the whole genius of
the Gospel; and the Christ, misunderstood by His people, must often
have wept in reading over again that scene, where the Governor of Egypt
throws himself on the neck of Benjamin, with the great cry of "I am
Joseph!"
Israel becomes the people of God, that is to say, the conservator of
the idea, and the depositaries of the word. This idea is that of human
independence, and of royalty, by means of work; but one hides it with
care, like a precious seed. A painful and indelible sign is imprinted
on the initiates; every image of the truth is forbidden, and the
children of Jacob watch, sword in hand, around the unity of the
tabernacle. Hamor and Shechem wish to introduce themselves forcibly
into the holy family, and perish with their people after undergoing a
feigned initiation. In order to dominate the vulgar, it is already
necessary that the sanctuary should surround itself with sacrifices and
with terror.
The servitude of the children of Jacob paves the way for their
deliverance: for they have an idea, and one does not enchain an idea;
they have a religion, and one does not {34} violate a religion; they
are, in fine, a people, and one does not enchain a real people.
Persecution stirs up avengers; the idea incarnates itself in a man;
Moses springs up; Pharaoh falls; and the column of smoke and flame,
which goes before a freed people, advances majestically into the
desert.
Christ is priest and king by intelligence and by love.
He has received the holy unction, the unction of genius, faith and
virtue, which is force.
He comes when the priesthood is worn out, when the old symbols have no
more virtue, when the beacon of intelligence is extinguished.
He comes to recall Israel to life, and if he cannot galvanize Israel,
slain by the Pharisees, into life, he will resurrect the world given
over to the dead worship of idols.
   Christ is the right to do ones duty.
   Man has the right to do his duty, and he has no other right.
   O man! thou hast the right to resist even unto death any who
   prevents thee from doing thy duty.
Mother Thy child is drowning; a man prevents thee from helping him;
thou strikest this man, thou dost run to save thy son! ... Who, then,
will dare to condemn thee?
Christ came to oppose the right of duty to the duty of right.
Right, with the Jews, was the doctrine of the Pharisees. And, indeed,
they seemed to have acquired the privilege of dogmatizing; were they
not the legitimate heirs of the synagogue?
They had the right to condemn the Saviour, and the Saviour knew that
His duty was to resist them. {35}
   Christ is the soul of protest.
   But the protest of what? Of the flesh against the intelligence? No!
   Of right against duty? No!
   Of the physical against the moral? No! No!
   Of imagination against universal reason? Of folly against wisdom?
   No, a thousand times No, and once more No!
   Christ is the reality, duty, which protests eternally against the
   ideality, right.
   He is the emancipation of the spirit which breaks the slavery of the
   flesh.
   He is devotion in revolt against egoism.
   He is the sublime modesty which replies to pride: "I will not obey
   thee!"
   Christ is unmated; Christ is solitary; Christ is sad: Why?
   Because woman has prostituted herself.
   Because society is guilty of theft.
   Because selfish joy is impious.
   Christ is judged, condemned, and executed; and men adore Him!
   This happened in a world perhaps as serious as our own.
   Judges of the world in which we live, pay attention, and think of
   Him who will judge your judgments!
   But, before dying, the Saviour bequea thed to His children the
   immortal sign of salvation, Communion.
Communion! Common union! the final word of the Saviour of the world!
"The Bread and the Wine shared among all," said He, "this is my flesh
and my blood." {36}
He gave His flesh to the executioners, His blood to the earth which
drank it. Why?
In order that all may partake of the bread of intelligence, and of the
wine of love.
O sign of the union of men! O Round Table of universal chivalry! O
banquet of fraternity and equality! When will you be better understood?
Martyrs of humanity, all ye who have given your life in order that all
should have the bread which nourishes and the wine which fortifies, do
ye not also say, placing your hands on the signs of the universal
communion: "This is our flesh and our blood"?
And you, men of the whole world, you whom the Master calls His
brothers; oh, do you not feel that the universal bread, the fraternal
bread, the bread of the communion, is God?
Retailers of the Crucified One!
All you who are not ready to give your blood, your flesh and your life
to humanity, you are not worthy of the Communion of the Son of God! Do
not let His blood flow upon you, for it would brand your forehead!
Do not approach your lips to the heart of God, He would feel your
sting!
Do not drink the blood of the Christ, it will burn your entrails; it is
quite sufficient that it should have flowed uselessly for you!

VIII
THE NUMBER EIGHT
   THE Ogdoad is the number of reaction and of equilibrating justice.
   {37}
   Every action produces a reaction.
   This is the universal law of the world.
   Christianity must needs produce anti-Christianity.
   Antichrist is the shadow, the foil, the proof of Christ.
Antichrist already produced itself in the Church in the time of the
Apostles: St. Paul said: --- "For the mystery of iniquity doth already
work; only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the
way. And then shall that Wicked One be revealed. ..."<<2 Thess. ii.
7,8. This passage is presumably that referred to by the author. Cf. 1
John iv. 3, and ii, 18. --- TRANS.>>
   The Protestants said: "Antichrist is the Pope."
   The Pope replied: "Every heretic is an Antichrist."
   The Antichrist is no more the Pope than Luther; the Antichrist is
   the spirit opposed to that of Christ.
   It is the usurpation of right for the sake of right; it is the pride
   of domination and the despotism of thought.
It is the selfishness, self-styled religious, of Protestants, as well
as the credulous and imperious ignorance of bad Catholics.
The Antichrist is what divides men instead of uniting them; it is a
spirit of dispute, the obstinacy of the theologians and sectarians, the
impious desire of appropriating the truth to oneself, and excluding
others from it, or of forcing the whole world to submit to the narrow
yoke of our judgments.
The Antichrist is the priest who curses instead of blessing, who drives
away instead of attracting, who scandalizes instead of edifying, who
damns instead of saving.
   It is the hateful fanaticism which discourages good-will.
   It is the worship of death, sadness, and ugliness. {38}
"What career shall we choose for our son?" have said many stupid
parents; "he is mentally and bodily weak, and he is without a spark of
courage: --- we will make a priest of him, so that he may live by the
altar." They have not understood that the altar is not a manger for
slothful animals.
Look at the unworthy priests, contemplate these pretended servants of
the altar! What do they say to your heart, these obese or cadaverous
men with the lack-lustre eyes, and pinched or gaping mouths?<
priests. Levis ideal priest, of whom bad; is an impossible epithet,
is not to be looked for in the Church. He is in that Church which is
also Ark, Rose, Font, Altar, Cup, and the rest. He is that Word of
Truth which is established by two witnesses. --- O. M.>>
Hear them talk: what does it teach you, their disagreeable and
monotonous noise?
They pray as they sleep, and they sacrifice as they eat.
They are machines full of bread, meat and wine, and of senseless words.
And when they plume themselves, like the oyster in the sun, on being
without thought and without love, one says that they have peace of
soul!
They have the peace of the brute. For man, that of the tomb is better:
these are the priests of folly and ignorance, these are the ministers
of Antichrist.
The true priest of Christ is a man who lives, suffers, loves and fights
for justice. He does not dispute, he does not reprove; he sends out
pardon, intelligence and love.
The true Christian is a stranger to the sectarian spirit; he is all
things to all men, and looks on all men as the children of a common
father, who means to save them all. The whole cult has for him only a
sense of sweetness and of {39} love: he leaves to God the secrets of
justice, and understands only charity.
He looks on the wicked as invalids whom one must pity and cure; the
world, with its errors and vices, is to him Gods hospital, and he
wishes to serve in it.
He does not think that he is better than any one else; he says only,
"So long as I am in good health, let me serve others; and when I must
fall and die, perhaps others will take my place and serve."

IX
THE NUMBER NINE
THIS is the hermit of the Tarot; the number which refers to initiates
and to prophets.
The prophets are solitaries, for it is their fate that none should ever
hear them.
They see differently from others; they forefeel misfortunes. So, people
imprison them and kill them, or mock them, repulse them as if they were
lepers, and leave them to die of hunger.
Then, when the predictions come true, they say, "It is these people who
have brought us misfortune."
Now, as is always the case on the eve of great disasters,<
true clairvoyant Levi. The Levi who prophesied Universal Empire for
Napoleon III was either the Magus trying to use him as a tool, or a
Micaiah unadjured. --- O. M.>> our streets are full of prophets.
I have met some of them in the prisons, I have seen others who were
dying forgotten in garrets.
The whole great city has seen one of them whose silent {40} prophecy
was to turn ceaselessly as he walked, covered with rags, in the palace
of luxury and riches.
I have seen one of them whose face shone like that of Christ: he had
callosities on his hands, and wore the workmans blouse; with clay he
kneaded epics. He twisted together the sword of right and the sceptre
of duty; and upon this column of gold and steel he placed the creative
sign of love.
One day, in a great popular assembly, he went down into the road with a
piece of bread in his hand which he broke and distributed, saying:
"Bread of God, do thou make bread for all!"
I know another of them who cried: "I will no longer adore the god of
the devil! I will not have a hangman for my God!" And they thought that
he blasphemed.
No; but the energy of his faith overflowed in inexact and imprudent
words.
He said again in the madness of his wounded charity: "The liabilities
of all men are common, and they expiate each others faults, as they
make merit for each other by their virtues.
   "The penalty of sin is death.
   "Sin itself, moreover, is a penalty, and the greatest of penalties.
   A great crime is nothing but a great misfortune.
   "The worst of men is he who thinks himself better than his follows.
"Passionate men are excusable, because they are passive; passion means
suffering, and also redemption through sorrow.
"What we call liberty is nothing but the all-mightiness of divine
compulsion. The martyrs said: It is better to obey God than man."
{41}
   "The least perfect act of love is worth more than the best act of
   piety."
   "Judge not; speak hardly at all; love and act."
   Another prophet came and said: "Protest against bad doctrines by
   good works, but do not separate yourselves.
   "Rebuild all the altars, purify all the temples, and hold yourselves
   in readiness for the visit of the Spirit.
   "Let every one pray in his own fashion, and hold communion with his
   own; but do not condemn others.
   "A religious practice is never contemptible, for it is the sign of a
   great and holy thought.
   "To pray together is to communicate in the same hope, the same
   faith, and the same charity.
   "The sign by itself is nothing; it is the faith which sanctifies it.
   "Religion is the most sacred and the strongest bond of human
   association, and to perform an act of religion is to perform an act
   of humanity."
   When men understand at last that one must not dispute about things
   about which one is ignorant,
   When they feel that a little charity is worth more than much
   influence and domination,
When the whole world respects what even God respects in the least of
His creatures, the spontaneity of obedience and the liberty of duty,
Then there will be no more than one religion in the world, the
Christian and universal religion, the true Catholic religion, which
will no longer deny itself by restrictions of place and of persons.
"Woman," said the Saviour to the woman of Samaria, {42} "Verily I say
unto thee, that the time cometh when men shall no longer worship God,
either in Jerusalem, or on this mountain; for God is a spirit,<
mistranslation by monotheists. The Greek is
GR:pi-nu-epsilon-upsilon-mu-alpha omicron Theta-epsilon-omicron-sigma:
"Spirit is God." --- TRANS.>> and they that worship Him must worship
Him in spirit and in truth."

X
THE ABSOLUTE NUMBER OF THE QABALAH
THE key of the Sephiroth. (Vide "Dogme et rituel de la haute magie.")

XI
THE NUMBER ELEVEN
ELEVEN is the number of force; it is that of strife and martyrdom.
Every man who dies for an idea is a martyr, for in him the aspirations
of the spirit have triumphed over the fears of the animal.
Every man who falls in war is a martyr, for he dies for others.
Every man who dies of starvation is a martyr, for he is like a soldier
struck down in the battle of life.
Those who die in defence of right are as holy in their sacrifice as the
victims of duty, and in the great struggles and revolutions against
power, martyrs fell equally on both sides.
Right being the root of duty, our duty is to defend our rights.
What is a crime? The exaggeration of a right. Murder {43} and theft are
negations of society; it is the isolated despotism of an individual who
usurps royalty, and makes war at his own risk and peril.
Crime should doubtless be repressed, and society must defend itself;
but who is so just, so great, so pure, as to pretend that he has the
right to punish?
Peace then to all who fall in war, even in unlawful war! For they have
staked their heads and they have lost them; they have paid, and what
more can we ask of them?
Honour to all those who fight bravely and loyally! Shame only on the
traitors and cowards!
Christ died between two thieves, and He took one of them with Him to
heaven.
The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by
force.
God bestows His almighty power on love. He loves to triumph over hate,
but the lukewarm He spueth forth from His mouth.
   Duty is to live, were it but for an instant!
   It is fine to have reigned for a day, even for an hour! though it
   were beneath the sword of Damocles, or upon the pyre of
   Sardanapalus!
   But it is finer to have seen at ones feet all the crowns of the
   world, and to have said, "I will be the king of the poor, and my
   throne shall be on Calvary."
   There is one man stronger than the man that slays; it is he who dies
   to save others.
   There are no isolated crimes and no solitary expiations.

There are no personal virtues, nor are there any wasted devotions. {44}
Whoever is not without reproach is the accomplice of all evil; and
whoever is not absolutely perverse, may participate in all good.
For this reason an agony is always an humanitarian expiation, and every
head that falls upon the scaffold may be honoured and praised as the
head of a martyr.
For this reason also, the noblest and the holiest of martyrs could
inquire of his own conscience, find himself deserving of the penalty
that he was about to undergo, and say, saluting the sword that was
ready to strike him, "Let justice be done!"
Pure victims of the Roman Catacombs, Jews and Protestants massacred by
unworthy Christians!
Priests of lAbbaye and les Carmes,<
used as prisons in the Reign of Terror. --- TRANS.>> victims of the
Reign of Terror, butchered royalists, revolutionaries sacrificed in
your turn, soldiers of our great armies who have sown the world with
your bones, all you who have suffered the penalty of death, workers,
strivers, darers of every kind, brave children of Prometheus, who have
feared neither the lightning nor the vulture, all honour to your
scattered ashes! Peace and veneration to your memories! You are the
heroes of progress, martyrs of humanity!

XII
THE NUMBER TWELVE
TWELVE is the cyclic number; it is that of the universal Creed. {45}
Here is a translation in alexandrines of the unrestricted magical and
Catholic creed: ---
   I do believe in God, almighty sire of man.
   One God, who did create the universe, his plan.
   I do believe in Him, the Son, the chief of men,
   Word and magnificence of the supreme Amen.
   He is the living thought of Loves eternal might,
   God manifest in flesh, the Action of the Light.
   Desired in every place and every period,
   But not a God that one may separate from God.
   Descended among men to free the earth from fate,
   He in His mother did the woman consecrate.
   He was the man whom heavens sweet wisdom did adorn;
   To suffer and to die as men do He was born.
   Proscribed by ignorance, accused by envy and strife,
   He died upon the cross that He might give us life.
   All who accept His aid to guide and to sustain
   By His example may to God like Him attain.
   He rose from death to reign throughout the ages dance;
   He is the sun that melts the clouds of ignorance.
   His precepts, better known and mightier soon to be,
   Shall judge the quick and dead for all eternity.
   I do believe in Gods most Holy Spirit, whose fire
   The heart and mind of saints and prophets did inspire.
   He is a Breath of life and of fecundity,
   Proceeding both from God and from humanity.
   I do believe in one most holy brotherhood
   Of just men that revere heavens ordinance of good.
   I do believe one place, one pontiff, and one right,
   One symbol of one God, in one intent unite.
   I do believe that death by changing us renews,
   And that in man as God life sheds immortal dews.

XIII
THE NUMBER THIRTEEN
THIRTEEN is the number of death and of birth; it is that of property
and of inheritance, of society and of family, of war and of treaties.
{46}
The basis of society is the exchange of right, duty and good faith.
Right is property, exchange is necessity, good faith is duty.
He who wants to receive more than he gives, or who wants to receive
without giving, is a thief.
Property is the right to dispose of a portion of the common wealth; it
is not the right to destroy, nor the right to sequestrate.
To destroy or sequestrate the common wealth is not to possess; it is to
steal.
I say common wealth, because the true proprietor of all things is God,
who wishes all things to belong to everybody. Whatever you may do, at
your death you will carry away nothing of this worlds goods. Now, that
which must be taken away from you one day is not really yours. It has
only been lent to you.
As to the usufruct, it is the result of work; but even work is not an
assured guarantee of possession, and war may come with devastation and
fire to displace property.
Make then good use of those things which perish, O you who will perish
before they do!
Consider that egoism provokes egoism, and that the immorality of the
rich man will answer for the crimes of the poor.
What does the poor man wish, if he is honest? He wishes for work.
Use your rights, but do your duty: the duty of the rich man is to
spread wealth; wealth which does not circulate is dead; do not hoard
death!
A sophist<--- TRANS.>> has said, "Property is robbery," and
he {47} doubtless wished to speak of property absorbed in itself,
withdrawn from free exchange, turned from common use.
If such were his thought, he might go further, and say that such a
suppression of public life is indeed assassination.
   It is the crime of monopoly, which public instinct has always looked
   upon as treason to the human race.
   The family is a natural society which results from marriage.
   Marriage is the union of two beings joined by love, who promise each
   other mutual devotion in the interest of the children who may be
   born.
   Married persons who have a child, and who separate, are impious. Do
   they then wish to execute the judgment of Solomon and hew the child
   asunder?
To vow eternal love is puerile; sexual love is an emotion, divine
doubtless, but accidental, involuntary and transitory; but the promise
of reciprocal devotion is the essence of marriage and the fundamental
principle of the family.
The sanction and the guarantee of this promise must then be an absolute
confidence.
Every jealousy is a suspicion, and every suspicion is an outrage.
The real adultery is the breach of this trust: the woman who complains
of her husb and to another man; the man who confides to another woman
the disappointments or the hopes of his heart, --- these do, indeed,
betray conjugal faith.
The surprises which ones senses spring upon one are only infidelities
on account of the impulses of the heart which abandons itself more or
less to the whispers of pleasure. Moreover, these are human faults for
which one must blush, {48} and which one ought to hide: they are
indecencies which one must avoid in advance by removing opportunity,
but which one must never seek to surprise: morality proscribes scandal.
Every scandal is a turpitude. One is not indecent because one possesses
organs which modesty does not name, but one is obscene when one
exhibits them.
Husbands, hide your domestic wounds; do not strip your wives naked
before the laughter of the mob!
Women, do not advertise the discomforts of the conjugal bed: to do so
is to write yourselves prostitutes in public opinion.
It needs a lofty degree of courage to keep conjugal faith; it is a pact
of heroism of which only great souls can understand the whole extent.
Marriages which break are not marriages: they are couplings.
A woman who abandons her husband, what can she become? She is no more a
wife, and she is not a widow; what is she then? She is an apostate from
honour who is forced to be licentious because she is neither virgin nor
free.
A husb and who abandons his wife prostitutes her, and deserves the
infamous name that one applies to the lovers of lost women.
Marriage is then sacred and indissoluble when it really exists.
But it cannot really exist, except for beings of a lofty intelligence
and of a noble heart.
The animals do not marry, and men who live like animals undergo the
fatalities of the brute nature.
They ceaselessly make unfortunate attempts to act {49} reasonably.
Their promises are attempts at and imitations of promises; their
marriages, attempts at and imitations of marriage; their loves,
attempts at and imitations of love. They always wish, and never will;
they are always undertaking and never completing. For such people, only
the repressive side of law applies.
Such beings may have a litter, but they never have a family: marriage
and family are the rights of the perfect man, the emancipated man, the
man who is intelligent and free.
Ask also the annals of the Courts, and read the history of parricides.
Raise the black veil from off all those chopped heads, and ask them
what they thought of marriage and of the family, what milk they sucked,
what caresses ennobled them. ... Then shudder, all you who do not give
to your children the bread of intelligence and of love, all you who do
not sanction paternal authority by the virtue of a good example!
Those wretches were orphans in spirit and in heart, and they have
avenged their birth.
We live in a century when more than ever the family is misunderstood in
all that it possesses which partakes of the august and the sacred:
material interest is killing intelligence and love; the lessons of
experience are despised, the things of God are hawked about the street.
The flesh insults the spirit, fraud laughs in the face of loyalty. No
more idealism, no more justice: human life has murdered both its father
and its mother.
Courage and patience! This century will go where great criminals should
go. Look at it, how sad it is! Weariness {50} is the black veil of its
face ... the tumbril rolls on, and the shuddering crown follows it. ..
Soon one more century will be judged by history, and one will write
upon a mighty tomb of ruins:
"Here ends the parricide century! The century which murdered its God
and its Christ!"
In war, one has the right to kill, in order not to die: but in the
battle of life the most sublime of rights is that of dying in order not
to kill.
Intelligence and love should resist oppression unto death --- but never
unto murder.
Brave man, the life of him who has offended you is in your hands; for
he is master of the life of others who cares not for his own... Crush
him beneath your greatness: pardon him!
   "But is it forbidden to kill the tiger which threatens us?"
   "If it is a tiger with a human face, it is finer to let him devour
   us, --- yet, for all that, morality has here nothing to say."
   "But if the tiger threatens my children?"
   "Let Nature herself reply to you!"
Harmodius and Aristogiton had festivals and statues in Ancient Greece.
The Bible has consecrated the names of Judith and Ehud, and one of the
most sublime figures of the Holy Book is that of Samson, blind and
chained, pulling down the columns of the temple, as he cried: "Let me
die with the Philistines!"
And yet, do you think that, if Jesus, before dying, had gone to Rome to
plunge his dagger in the heart of Tiberius, He would have saved the
world, as He did, in forgiving His executioners, and in dying for even
Tiberius? {51}
Did Brutus save Roman liberty by killing Caesar? In killing Caligula,
Chaerea only made place for Claudius and Nero. To protest against
violence by violence, is to justify it, and to force it to reproduce
itself.
But to triumph over evil by good, over selfishness by selfabnegation,
over ferocity by pardon, that is the secret of Christianity, and it is
that of eternal victory.
"I have seen the place where the earth still bled from the murder of
"Abel," and on that place there ran a brook of tears.
Under the guidance of the centuries, myriads of men moved on, letting
fall their tears into the brook.
And Eternity, crouching mournful, gazed upon the tears which fell; she
counted them one by one, and there were never enough to them to wash
away one stain of blood.
But between two multitudes and two ages came the Christ, a pale and
radiant figure.
And in the earth of blood and tears, He planted the vine of fraternity;
and the tears and the blood, sucked up by the roots of the divine tree,
became the delicious sap of the grape, which is destined to intoxicate
with love the children of the future.

XIV
THE NUMBER FOURTEEN
FOURTEEN is the number of fusion, of association, and of universal
unity, and it is in the name of what it represents that we shall here
make an appeal to the nations, beginning with the most ancient and the
most holy.
Children of Israel, why, in the midst of the movement of {52} the
nations, do you rest immobile, guardians of the tombs of your fathers?
Your fathers are not here, they are risen: for the God of Abraham, of
Isaac, and of Jacob, is not the God of the dead!
Why do you always impress upon your offspring the bloody sigil of the
knife?
God no longer wishes to separate you from other men; be our brethren,
and eat with us the consecrated Bread of peace on altars that blood
stains never.
The law of Moses is accomplished: read your books and understand that
you have been a blind and hard-hearted race, even as all your prophets
said to you.
You have also been a courageous race, a race that persevered in strife.
Children of Israel, become the children of God: Understand and love!
God has wiped from your forehead the brand of Cain, and the peoples
seeing you pass will no longer say, "There go the Jews!" They will cry,
"Room for our brethren! Room for our elders in the Faith!"
And we shall go every year to eat the passover with you in the city of
the New Jerusalem.
And we shall take our rest under your vine and under your fig-tree; for
you will be once more the friend of the traveller, in memory of
Abraham, of Tobias, and of the angels who visited them.
And in memory of Him who said: "He who receiveth the least of these My
little ones, receiveth Me."
For then you will no longer refuse an asylum in your {53} house and in
your heart to your brother Joseph, whom you sold to the Gentiles.
Because he has become powerful in the land of Egypt where you sought
bread in the days of famine.
And he has remembered his father Jacob, and Benjamin his young brother,
and he pardons you your jealousy, and embraces you with tears.
Children of true believers, we will sing with you: "There is no God but
God, and Mohammed is His prophet!"
Say with the children of Israel: "There is no God but God, and Moses is
His prophet!"
Say with the Christians: "There is no God but God, and Jesus Christ is
His prophet!"
Mohammed is the shadow of Moses. Moses is the forerunner of Jesus.
What is a prophet? A representative of humanity seeking God. God is
God, and man is the prophet of God, when he causes us to believe in
God.
The Old Testament, the Quran, and the Gospel are three different
translations of the same book. As God is one, so also is the law.
O ideal woman! O reward of the elect! Art thou more beautiful than
Mary?
O Mary, daughter of the East! caste as pure love, great as the desire
of motherhood, come and teach the children of Islam the mysteries of
Paradise, and the secrets of beauty!
Invite them to the festival of the new alliance! There, upon three
thrones glittering with precious stones, three prophets will be seated.
{54}
The tuba tree will make, with its back-curving branches, a dais for the
celestial table.
The bride will be white as the moon, and scarlet as the smile of
morning.
All nations shall press forward to see her, and they will no longer
fear to pass AL Sirah; for, on that razor-edged bridge, the Saviour
will stretch His cross, and come to stretch His hand to those who
stumble, and to those who have fallen the bride will stretch her
perfumed veil, and draw them to her.
O ye people, clap your hands, and praise the last triumph of love!
Death alone will remain dead, and hell alone will be consumed!
O nations of Europe, to whom the East stretches forth its hands, unite
and push back the northern bear!<
War, this indicates Levis attempt to use Imperialism as his magical
weapon, just as Allan Bennett tried to use Buddhism. All these
second-hand swords break, as Wagner saw when he wrote "Siegfried," and
invented a new Music, a Nothung which has shorn asunder more false
sceptres than Wotans. --- O. M.>> Let the last war bring the triumph
of intelligence and love, let commerce interlace the arms of the world,
and a new civilization, sprung from the armed Gospel, unite all the
flocks of the earth under the crook of the same shepherd!
Such will be the conquests of progress, such is the end towards which
the whole movement of the world is pushing us.
   Progress is movement, and movement is life.
   To deny progress is to affirm nothingness, and to deify death.
Progress is the only reply that reason can give to the objections which
the existence of evil raises. {55}
   All is not well, but all will be well one day. God begins His work,
   and He will finish it.
   Without progress, evil would be immutable like God.
   Progress explains ruins, and consoles the weeping of Jeremiah.
   Nations succeed each other like men; and nothing is stable, because
   everything is marching towards perfection.
The great man who dies bequea thes to his country the fruit of his
works; the great nation which becomes extinguished upon earth
transforms itself into a star to enlighten the obscurities of History.
What it has written by its actions remains graven in the eternal book;
it has added a page to the Bible of the human race.
Do not say that civilization is bad; for it resembles the damp heat
which ripens the harvest, it rapidly develops the principles of life
and the principles of death, it kills and it vivifies.
It is like the angel of the judgment who separates the wicked from the
good.
Civilization transforms men of good will into angels of light, and
lowers the selfish man beneath the brute; it is the corruption of
bodies and the emancipation of souls.
The impious world of the giants raised to Heaven the soul of Enoch;
above the Bacchanals of primitive Greece rises the harmonious spirit of
Orpheus.
Socrates and Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, resume, in explaining
them, all the aspirations and all the glories of the ancient world; the
fables of Homer remain truer than history, and nothing remains to us of
the grandeur of Rome {56} but the immortal writings which the century
of Augustus brought forth.
Thus, perhaps, Rome only shook the world with the convulsions of war,
in order to bring forth Vergil.
Christianity is the fruit of the meditations of all the sages of the
East, who live again in Jesus Christ.
Thus the light of the spirits has risen where the sun of the world
rises; Christ conquered the West, and the soft rays of the sun of Asia
have touched the icicles of the North.
Stirred by this unknown heat, ant-heaps of new men have spread over a
worn-out world; the souls of dead people have shone upon rejuvenated
races, and enlarged in them the spirit of life.
There is in the world a nation which calls itself frankness and
freedom, for these two words are synonymous with the name of France.
This nation has always been in some ways more Catholic than the Pope,
and more Protestant than Luther.
The France of the Crusades, the France of the Troubadours, the France
of songs, the France of Rabelais and of Voltaire, the France of Bossuet
and of Pascal, it is she who is the synthesis of all peoples: it is she
who consecrates the alliance of reason and of faith, of revolution and
of power, of the most tender belief and of the proudest human dignity.
And, see how she marches, how she swings herself, how she struggles,
how she grows great!
Often deceived and wounded, never cast down, enthusiastic over her
triumphs, daring in her adversities, she laughs, she sings, she dies,
and she teaches the world faith in immortality. {57}
The old guard does not surrender, but neither does it die! The proof of
it is the enthusiasm of our children, who mean, one day, to be also
soldiers of the old guard!
Napoleon is no more a man: he is the very genius of France, he is the
second saviour of the world, and he also gave for a sign the cross to
his apostles.
St. Helena and Golgotha are the beacons of the new civilization; they
are the two piles of an immerse bridge made by the rainbow of the final
deluge, and which throws a bridge between the two worlds.
And can you believe that a past without aureole and without glory,
might capture and devour so great a future?
Could you think that the spur of a Tartar might one day tear up the
pact of our glories, the testament of our liberties?
Say rather that we may again become children, and enter again into our
mothers womb!
"Go on! Go on!" said the voice of God to the wandering Jew. "Advance!
Advance!" the destiny of the world cries out to France. And where do we
go? To the unknown, the the abyss perhaps; no matter! But to the past,
to the cemeteries of oblivion, to the swaddling-clothes which our
childhood itself tore in shreds, towards the imbecility and ignorance
of the earliest ages ... never! never!

XV
THE NUMBER FIFTEEN
   FIFTEEN is the number of antagonism, and of catholicity.
   Christianity is at present divided into two churches: the {58}
   civilizing church, and the savage church; the progressive church,
   and the stationary church.
One is active, the other is passive: one has mastered the nations and
governs them always, since kings fear it; the other has submitted to
every despotism, and can be nothing but an instrument of slavery.
The active church realizes God for men, and alone believes in the
divinity of the human Word, as an interpreter of that of God.
What after all is the infallibility of the Pope, but the autocracy of
intelligence, confirmed by the universal vote of faith?
In this case, one might say, the Pope ought to be the first genius of
his century. Why? It is more proper, in reality, that he should be an
average man. His supremacy is only more divine for that, because it is
in a way more human.
Do not events speak louder than rancours and irreligious ignorances? Do
not you see Catholic France sustaining with one hand the tottering
papacy, and with the other holding the sword to fight at the head of
the army of progress?
Catholics, Jews, Turks, Protestants, already fight under the same
banner; the crescent has rallied to the Latin cross, and altogether we
struggle against the invasion of the barbarians, and their brutalizing
orthodoxy.
It is for ever an accomplished fact. In admitting new dogmas, the chair
of St. Peter has solemnly proclaimed itself progressive.
The fatherl and of Catholic Christianity is that of the sciences and of
the fine arts; and the eternal Word of the Gospel, living and incarnate
in a visible authority, is still the light of the world. {59}
Silence, then, to the Pharisees of the new synagogue! Silence to the
hateful traditions of the Schools, to the arrogance of Presbyterianism,
to the absurdity of Jansenism, and to all those shameful and
superstitious interpretations of the eternal dogma, so justly
stigmatized by the pitiless genius of Voltaire!
Voltaire and Napoleon died Catholics.<<"I do not say that Voltaire died
a good Catholic, but he died a Catholic." --- E. L. Christian authors
unanimously hold that, like all heretics, he repented on his
death-bed, and died blaspheming. What on earth does it matter? Life,
not death, reveals the soul. --- TRANS.>> And do you know what the
Catholicism of the future must be?
It will be the dogma of the Gospel, tried like gold by the critical
acid of Voltaire, and realized, in the kingdom of the world, by the
genius of the Christian Napoleon.
Those who will not march will be dragged or trampled by events.
Immense calamities may again hang over the world. The armies of the
Apocalypse may, perhaps, one day, unchain the four scourges. The
sanctuary will be cleansed. Rigid and holy poverty will send forth its
apostles to uphold what staggers, lift up again what is broken, and
anoint all wounds with sacred oils.
Those two blood-hungered monsters, despotism and anarchy, will tear
themselves to pieces, and annihilate each other, after having mutually
sustained each other for a little while, by the embrace of their
struggle itself.
And the government of the future will be that whose model is shown to
us in nature, by the family, and in the religious world by the pastoral
hierarchy. The elect shall reign with Jesus Christ during a thousand
years, say the {60} apostolic traditions: that is to say, that during a
series of centuries, the intelligence and love of chosen men, devoted
to the burden of power, will administer the interests and the wealth of
the universal family.
At that day, according to the promise of the Gospel, there will be no
more than one flock and one shepherd.

XVI
THE NUMBER SIXTEEN
   SIXTEEN is the number of the temple.
   Let us say what the temple of the future will be!
   When the spirit of intelligence and love shall have revealed itself,
   the whole trinity will manifest itself in its truth and in its
   glory.
Humanity, become a queen, and, as it were, risen from the dead, will
have the grace of childhood in its poesy, the vigour of youth in its
reason, and the wisdom of ripe age in its works.
All those forms, which the divine thought has successively clothed,
will be born again, immortal and perfect.
All those features which the art of successive nations has sketched
will unite themselves, and form the complete image of God.
Jerusalem will rebuild the Temple of Jehovah on the model prophesied by
Ezekiel; and the Christ, new and eternal Solomon, will chant, beneath
roofs of cedar and of cypress, the Epithalamium of his marriage with
holy liberty, the holy bride of the Song of Songs.
But Jehovah will have laid aside his thunderbolts, to bless {61} with
both hands the bridegroom and the bride; he will appear smiling between
them, and take pleasure in being called father.
However, the poetry of the East, in its magical souvenirs, will call
him still Brahma, and Jupiter. India will teach our enchanted climates
the marvellous fables of Vishnu, and we shall place upon the still
bleeding forehead of our well-beloved Christ the triple crown of pearls
of the mystical Trimurti. From that time, Venus, purified under the
veil of Mary, will no more weep for her Adonis.
The bridegroom is risen to die no more, and the infernal boar has found
death in its momentary victory.
Lift yourselves up again, O Temples of Delphi and of Ephesus! The God
of Light and of Art is become the God of the world, and the Word of God
is indeed willing to be called Apollo! Diana will no more reign widowed
in the lonely fields of night; her silvern crescent is now beneath the
feet of the bride.
But Diana is not conquered by Venus; her Endymion has wakened, and
virginity is about to take pride in motherhood!
Quit the tomb, O Phidias, and rejoice in the destruction of thy first
Jupiter: it is now that thou wilt conceive a God!
O Rome, let thy temples rise again, side by side with thy basilicas: be
once more the Queen of the World, and the Pantheon of the nations; let
Vergil be crowned on the Capitol by the hand of St. Peter; and let
Olympus and Carmel unite their divinities beneath the brush of Raphael!
Transfigure yourselves, ancient cathedrals of our fathers; dart forth
into the clouds your chiselled and living arrows, and {62} let stone
record in animated figures the dark legends of the North, brightened by
the marvellous gilded apologues of the Quran!
Let the East adore Jesus Christ in its mosques, and on the minarets of
a new Santa Sophia let the cross rise in the midst of the crescent!<
is amusing to remark that this very symbol is characteristic of the
Greek Church which he has been attacking. Levi should have visited
Moscow. --- TRANS.>>
Let Mohammed set woman free to give to the true believer the houris
which he has so long dreamt of, and let the martyrs of the Saviour
teach chaste caresses to the beautiful angels of Mohammed!
The whole earth, reclothed with the rich adornments which all the arts
have embroidered for her, will no longer be anything but a magnificent
temple, of which man shall be the eternal priest.
All that was true, all that was beautiful, all that was sweet in the
past centuries, will live once more glorified in this transfiguration
of the world.
And the beautiful form will remain inseparable from the true idea, as
the body will one day be inseparable from the soul, when the soul, come
to its own power, will have made itself a body in its own image.
That will be the kingdom of Heaven upon Earth, and the body will be the
temple of the soul, as the regenerated universe will be the body of
God.
And bodies and souls, and form and thought, and the whole universe,
will be the light, the word, and the permanent and visible revelation
of God. Amen. So be it. {63}

XVII
THE NUMBER SEVENTEEN
SEVENTEEN is the number of the star; it is that of intelligence and
love.
Warrior and bold intelligence, accomplice of divine Prometheus, eldest
daughter of Lucifer, hail unto thee in thine audacity! Thou didst wish
to know, and in order to possess, thou didst brave all the thunders,
and affronted every abyss!
Intelligence, O Thou, whom we poor sinners have loved to madness, to
scandal, to reprobation! Divine right of man, essence and soul of
liberty, hail unto thee! For they have pursued thee, in trampling
beneath their feet for thee the dearest dreams of their imagination,
the best beloved phantoms of their heart!
For thee, they have been repulsed and proscribed, for thee they have
suffered prison, nakedness, hunger, thirst, the desertion of those whom
they loved, and the dark temptations of despair! Thou wast their right,
and they have conquered thee! Now they can weep and believe, now they
can submit themselves and pray!
Repentant Cain would have been greater than Abel: it is lawful pride
satisfied which has the right to humiliate itself!
I believe because I know why and how one must believe; I believe
because I love, and fear no more.
Love! Love! Sublime redeemer and sublime restorer; thou who makest so
much happiness, with so many tortures, thou who didst sacrifice blood
and tears, thou who art virtue {64} itself, and the reward of virtue;
force of resignation, belief of obedience, joy of sorrow, life of
death, hail! Salutation and glory to thee! If intelligence is a lamp,
thou art its flame; if it is right, thou art duty; if it is nobility,
thou art happiness. Love, full of pride and modesty in thy mysteries,
divine love, hidden love, love insensate and sublime, Titan who takest
Heaven in both hands, and forcest it to earth, final and ineffable
secret of Christian widowhood, love eternal, love infinite, ideal which
would suffice to create worlds; love! love! blessing and glory to thee!
Glory to the intelligences which veil themselves that they may not
offend weak eyes! Glory to right which transforms itself wholly into
duty, and which becomes devotion! To the widowed souls who love, and
burn up without being loved! To those who suffer, and make none other
suffer, to those who forgive the ungrateful, to those who love their
enemies! Oh, happy evermore, happy beyond all, are those who embrace
poverty, who have drained themselves to the dregs, to give! Happy are
the souls who for ever make thy peace! Happy the pure and the simple
hearts that never think themselves better than others! Humanity, my
mother, humanity daughter and mother of God, humanity conceived without
sin, universal Church, Mary! Happy is he who has dared all to know thee
and to understand thee, and who is ready to suffer all once more, in
order to serve thee and to love thee!

XVIII
THE NUMBER EIGHTEEN
THIS number is that of religious dogma, which is all poetry and all
mystery. {65}
The Gospel says that at the death of the Saviour the veil of the Temple
was rent, because that death manifested the triumph of devotion, the
miracle of charity, the power of God in man, divine humanity, and human
divinity, the highest and most sublime of Arcana, the last word of all
initiations.
But the Saviour knew that at first men would not understand him, and he
said: "You will not be able to bear at present the full light of my
doctrine; but, when the Spirit of Truth shall manifest himself, he will
teach you all truth, and he will cause you to understand the sense of
what I have said unto you."
Now the Spirit of Truth is the spirit of science and intelligence, the
spirit of force and of counsel.
It is that spirit which solemnly manifested itself in the Roman Church,
when it declared in the four articles of its decree of the 12^th
December, 1845:
1 Degree. --- That if faith is superior to reason, reason ought to
endorse the inspirations of faith;
2 Degree. --- That faith and science have each their separate domain,
and that the one should not usurp the functions of the other;
3 Degree. --- That it is proper for faith and grace, not to weaken, but
on the contrary to streng then and develop reason;
4 Degree. --- That the concourse of reason, which examines, not the
decisions of faith, but the natural and rational bases of the authority
which decides them, far from injuring faith, can only be useful to it;
in other words, that a faith, perfectly reasonable in its principles,
should not fear, but should, on the contrary, desire the sincere
examination of reason.
Such a decree is the accomplishment of a complete religious {66}
revolution, it is the inauguration of the reign of the Holy Ghost upon
the earth.

XIX
THE NUMBER NINETEEN
   IT is the number of light.
   It is the existence of God proved by the very idea of God.
Either one must say that Being is the universal tomb where, by an
automatic movement, stirs a form for ever dead and corpse-like, or one
must admit the absolute principle of intelligence and of life.
Is the universal light dead or alive? Is it vowed fatally to the work
of destruction, or providentially directed to an immortal birth?
If there be no God, intelligence is only a deception, for it fails to
be the absolute, and its ideal is a lie.
Without God, being is a nothingness affirming itself, life a death in
disguise, and light a night for ever deceived by the mirage of dreams.
The first and most essential act of faith is then this.
Being exists; and the Being of beings, the Truth of being, is God.
Being is alive with intelligence, and the living intelligence of
absolute being is God.
Light is real and life-giving; now, the reality and life of all light
is God.
The word of universal reason is an affirmation and not a negation.
How blind are they who do not see that physical light is nothing but
the instrument of thought! {67}
Thought alone, then, reveals light, and creates it in using it for its
own purposes.
The affirmation of atheism is the dogma of eternal night: the
affirmation of God is the dogma of light!
We stop here at the number Nineteen, although the sacred alphabet has
twenty-two letters; but the first nineteen are the keys of occult
theology. The others are the keys of Nature; we shall return to them in
the third part of this work.

Let us resume what we have said concerning God, by quoting a fine
invocation borrowed from the Jewish liturgy. It is a page from the
qabalistic poem Kether-Malkuth, by Rabbi Solomon, son of Gabirol:
"Thou art one, the beginning of all numbers, and the foundation of all
buildings; thou art one, and in the secret of thy unity the most wise
of men are lost, because they know it not. Thou art one, and thy unity
neither wanes nor waxes, neither suffers any change. Thou art one, and
yet not the one of the mathematician, for thy unity admits neither
multiplication, nor change, nor form. Thou art one, and not one of mine
imaginations can fix a limit for thee, or give a definition of thee;
therefore will I take heed to my ways, lest I offend with my tongue.
Thou art one indeed, whose excellence is so lofty, that it may in no
wise fall, by no means like that one which may cease to be.
"Thou art the existing one; nevertheless, the understanding and the
sight of mortals cannot attain thine existence, nor place in thee the
where, the how, the why. Thou art the {68} existing one, but in
thyself, since no other can exist beside thee. Thou art the existing
one, before time, and beyond space. Thou art indeed the existing one,
and thine existence is so hidden, and so deep, that none can discover
it, or penetrate its secret.
"Thou art the living one, but not in fixed and known time; thou art the
living one, but not by spirit or by soul; for thou art the Soul of all
souls. Thou art the living one; but not living with the life of
mortals, that is, like a breath, and whose end is to give food to
worms. Thou art the living one, and he that can attain thy mysteries
will enjoy eternal delight and live for ever.
"Thou art great; before thy greatness all other greatness bows, and all
that is most excellent becomes imperfect. Thou art great above all
imagination, and thou art exalted above all the hierarchies of Heaven.
Thou art great above all greatness, and thou art exalted above all
praise. Thou art strong, and not one among thy creatures can do the
works that thou dost, nor can his force be compared with thine. Thou
art strong, and it is to thee that belongs that strength invincible
which changes not and decays never. Thou art strong; by thy
loving-kindness thou dost forgive in the moment of thy most burning
wrath, and thou showest thyself long-suffering to sinners. Thou art
strong, and thy mercies, existing from all time, are upon all thy
creatures. Thou art the eternal light, that pure souls shall see, and
that the cloud of sins will hide from the eyes of sinners. Thou art the
light which is hidden in this world, and visible in the other, where
the glory of the Lord is shown forth. Thou art Sovereign, and the eyes
of understanding which desire to see thee are all {69} amazed, for they
can attain but part of it, never the whole. Thou art the God of gods,
and all thy creatures bear witness to it; and in honour of this great
name they owe thee all their worship. Thou art God, and all created
beings are thy servants and thy worshippers: thy glory is not
tarnished, although men worship other gods, because their intention is
to address themselves to thee; they are like blind men, who wish to
follow the straight road, but stray; one falls into a well, the other
into a ditch; all think that they are come to their desire, yet they
have wearied themselves in vain. But thy servants are like men of clear
sight travelling upon the highroad; never do they stray from it, either
to the right hand or the left, until they are entered into the court of
the kings palace. Thou art God, who by thy godhead sustainest all
beings, and by thy unity dost being home all creatures. Thou art God,
and there is no difference between thy deity, thy unity, thy eternity,
and thy existence; for all is one and the same mystery; although names
vary, all returns to the same truth. Thou art the knower, and that
intelligence which is the source of life emanates from thyself; and
beside thy knowledge all the wisest men are fools. Thou art the knower,
and the ancient of the ancient ones, and knowledge has ever fed from
thee. Thou art the knower, and thou hast learned thy knowledge from
none, nor hast acquired it but from thyself. Thou art the knower, and
like a workman and an architect thou hast taken from thy knowledge a
divine will, at an appointed time, to draw being from nothing; so that
the light which falls from the eyes is drawn from its own centre
without any instrument or tool. This divine will has hollowed,
designed, purified and moulded; it has ordered {70} Nothingness to open
itself, Being to shut up, and the world to spread itself. It has
spanned the heavens, and assembled with its power the tabernacle of the
spheres, with the cords of its might it has bound the curtains of the
creatures of the universe, and touching with its strength the edge of
the curtain of creation, has joined that which is above to that which
was below." --- ("Prayers of Kippour.")
We have given to these bold qabalistic speculations the only form which
suits them, that is, poesy, or the inspiration of the heart.
Believing souls will have no need of the rational hypotheses contained
in this new explanation of the figures of the Bible; but those sincere
hearts afflicted by doubt, which are tortured by eighteenth-century
criticism, will understand in reading it that even reason without faith
can find in the Holy Book something besides stumbling-blocks; if the
veils with which the divine text is covered throw a great shadow, this
shadow is so marvellously designed by the interplay of light that it
becomes the sole intelligible image of the divine ideal.
Ideal, incomprehensible as infinity, and indispensable as the very
essence of mystery!

{71}


ARTICLE II
SOLUTION OF THE SECOND PROBLEM

TRUE RELIGION
   RELIGION exists in humanity, like love.
   Like it, it is unique.
Like it, it either exists, or does not exist, in such and such a soul;
but, whether one accepts it or denies it, it is in humanity; it is,
then, in life, it is in nature itself; it is an incontestable fact of
science, and even of reason.
The true religion is that which has always existed, which exists
to-day, and will exist for ever.
Some one may say that religion is this or that; religion is what it is.
This is the true religion, and the false religions are superstitions
imitated from her, borrowed from her, lying shadows of herself!
One may say of religion what one says of true art. Savage attempts at
painting or sculpture are the attempts of ignorance to arrive at the
truth. Art proves itself by itself, is radiant with its own splendour,
is unique and eternal like beauty.
The true religion is beautiful, and it is by that divine character that
it imposes itself on the respect of science, and obtains the assent of
reason.
Science dare not affirm or deny those dogmatic hypotheses which are
truths for faith; but it must recognize by unmistakable {72} characters
the one true religion, that is to say, that which alone merits the name
of religion in that it unites all the characters which agree with that
great and universal aspiration of the human soul.
One only thing, which is to all most evidently divine, is manifested in
the world.
It is charity.
The work of true religion should be to produce, to preserve, and to
spread abroad the spirit of charity.
To arrive at this end she must herself possess all the characteristics
of charity, in such a manner that one could define her satisfactorily,
in naming her, "Organic Charity."
   Now, what are the characteristics of charity?
   It is St. Paul who will tell us.
   Charity is patient.
   Patient like God, because it is eternal as He is. It suffers
   persecutions, and never persecutes others.
   It is kindly and loving, calling to itself the little, and not
   repulsing the great.
It is without jealousy. Of whom, and of what, should it be jealous? Has
it not that better part which shall not be taken away from it?
It is neither quarrelsome nor intriguing.
It is without pride, without ambition, without selfishness, without
anger.
It never thinks evil, and never triumphs by injustice; for all its joy
is comprehended in truth.
It endures everything, without ever tolerating evil.
It believes all; its faith is simple, submissive, hierarchical, and
universal. {73}
It sustains all, and never imposes burdens which it is not itself the
first to carry.
{Illustration on page 74 described:
This is titled below: "GREAT PENTACLE FROM THE VISION OF ST. JOHN"
The figure is contained within a rectangle of width a bit less than
half height. The figure itself is taken from Revelations Chapter 10 and
is roughly divisible into four parts. The top contains a human head and
upraised left hand in a shaded semi-circle under an arch of three
curved lines. The hand is palmer, thumb out, first and middle fingers
upright and two remaining fingers to palm. "MICROPROSOPUS" is written
horizontally above the arch, "Gnosis" to the left and "Atziluth"
"Jezirah" "BRIAH" "Sulphur" to the right in rows. Following the arch
outside to the left is "EIS THS". Following the arch outside to the
right is "GR:alpha-iota-omega-nu-alpha-sigma Alpha-mu-eta-nu" --- Greek
is difficult to tell from Latin letters here, and the first part looks
very much like "aiwvas", almost Crowleys "Aiwass" and very possibly a
subconscious inspiration for it. There is a suggestion of a nimbus
about the head. The section next down is contained largely within a
cloud. To the left, outside "Psyche". To the right outside in rows
"Aziah" "JEZIRAH" "Mercury". In the center is a book held open by a
right hand flat against the left page and open, palm to book, fingers
extending to base of right page. At the top of this portion, just below
the chin of the upper section head is the word " GR:eta
delta-omicron-xi-alpha" (the glory). Immediately below this and above
the spine of the book is an unrecognizable character a little like
GR:mu or Mem from the Alphabet of the Magi, although this is the normal
place for "Alpha". Immediately below the book is " GR:eta
delta-upsilon-nu-alpha-mu-iota-sigma" (the power). There is a strange
character below this, at the bottom of this section and like that noted
above --- even harder to recognize, but this is the usual position for
"Omega". The third section from the top and second from the bottom has
two pillars issuing from the cloud. These have fluted capitols and
ringed bases extending to form trapezoidal forms. The pillar to the
left is black and marked at center with "B", while that to the right is
white with "J". To the left is "Hyle". To the right in rows "Briah"
"AZIAH" and a small rectangle. There is a crescent moon between the
bases of the drums, horns angled right and slightly upward. The lowest
portion shows feet issuing from the bases of the pillars and cocked
outward on a mass of rock to the left and a sea to the right. " GR:eta
beta-alpha-sigma-iota-lambda-epsilon-iota-alpha" (the kingdom) is
written on the base of this rock. The rectangular frame is broken at
the bottom to admit crude Hebrew letters, evidently
Yod-Shin-Heh-Vau-Heh or something similar with the doubt being on the
HB:Heh s looking like HB:Chet s. Below this is what appears to be
GR:Omicron-tau-iota omicron-delta epsilon-delta-iota-nu, but the poor
penmanship makes certain identification impossible. The entire figure
gives the impression of a man with head in heaven and feet on earth.}
Religion is patient --- the religion of great thinkers and of martyrs.
It is benevolent like Christ and the apostles, like Vincent de Paul,
and like Fenelon.
It envies not either the dignities or the goods of the earth. {74} It
is the religion of the fathers of the desert, of St. Francis, and of
St. Bruno, of the Sisters of Charity, and of the Brothers of
Saint-Jean-de- Dieu.
It is neither quarrelsome nor intriguing. It prays, does good, and
waits.
It is humble, it is sweet-tempered, it inspires only devotion and
sacrifice. It has, in short, all the characteristics of Charity because
it is Charity itself.
Men, on the contrary, are impatient, persecutors, jealous, cruel,
ambitious, unjust, and they show themselves as such, even in the name
of that religion which they have succeeded in calumniating, but which
they will never cause to life. Men pass away, but truth is eternal.
Daughter of Charity, and creator of Charity in her own turn, true
religion is essentially that which realizes; she believes in the
miracles of faith, because she herself accomplishes them every day when
she practises charity. Now, a religion which practises charity may
flatter herself that she realizes all the dreams of divine love.
Moreover, the faith of the hierarchical church transforms mysticism
into realism by the efficacy of her sacraments. No more signs, no more
figures whose strength is not in grace, and which do not really give
what they promise! Faith animates all, makes all in some sort visible
and palpable; even the parables of Jesus Christ take a body and a soul.
They show, at Jerusalem, the house of the wicked rich man!! The thin
symbolisms of the primitive religions overturned by science, and
deprived of the life of faith, resemble those whitened bones which
covered the field that Ezekiel saw in his vision. The Spirit of the
Saviour, the spirit of faith, the spirit of {75} charity, has breathed
upon this dust; and all that which was dead has taken life again so
really that one recognizes no more yesterdays corpses in these living
creatures of to-day. And why should one recognize them, since the world
is renewed, since St. Paul burned at Ephesus the books of the
hierophants? Was then St. Paul a barbarian, and was he committing a
crime against science? No, but he burned the winding-sheets of the
resuscitated that they might forget death. Why, then, do we to-day
recall the qabalistic origins of dogma? Why do we join again the
figures of the Bible to the allegories of Hermes? Is it to condemn St.
Paul, is it to bring doubt to believers? No, indeed, for believers have
no need of our book; they will not read it, and they will not wish to
understand it. But we wish to show to the innumerable crowd of those
who doubt, that faith is attached to the reason of all the centuries,
to the science of all the sages. We wish to force human liberty to
respect divine authority, reason to recognize the bases of faith, so
that faith and authority, in their turn, may never again proscribe
liberty and reason.

{76}



ARTICLE III
SOLUTION OF THE THIRD PROBLEM

THE RATIONALE OF THE MYSTERIES
FAITH being the aspiration to the unknown, the object of faith is
absolutely and necessarily this one thing --- Mystery.
In order to formulate its aspirations, faith is forced to borrow
aspirations and images from the known.
But she specializes the employment of these forms, by placing them
together in a manner which, in the known order of things, is
impossible. Such is the profound reason of the apparent absurdity of
symbolism.
Let us give an example:
If faith said that God was impersonal, one might conclude that God is
only a word, or, at most, a thing.
If it is said that God was a person, one would represent to oneself the
intelligent infinite, under the necessarily bounded form of an
individual.
It says, "God is one in three persons," in order to express that one
conceives in God both unity and multiplicity.
The formula of a mystery excludes necessarily the very intelligence of
that formula, so far as it is borrowed from the world of known things;
for, if one understood it, it would express the known and not the
unknown.
It would then belong to science, and no longer to religion, that is to
say, to faith. {77}
The object of faith is a mathematical problem, whose "x" escapes the
procedures of our algebra.
Absolute mathematics prove only the necessity, and, in consequence, the
existence of this unknown which we represent by the untranslatable "x."
Now science progresses in vain; its progress is indefinite, but always
relatively finite; it will never find in the language of the finite the
complete expression of the infinite. Mystery is therefore eternal.
To bring into the logic of the known the terms of a profession of faith
is to withdraw them from faith, which has for positive bases
anti-logic, that is to say, the impossibility of logically explaining
the unknown.
For the Jew, God is separate from humanity; He does not live in His
creatures, He is infinite egoism.
For the Mussulman, God is a word before which one prostrates oneself,
on the authority of Mohammed.
For the Christian, God has revealed himself in humanity, proves Himself
by charity, and reigns by virtue of the order which constitutes the
hierarchy.
The hierarchy is the guardian of dogma, for whose letter and spirit she
alike demands respect. The sectarians who, in the name of their reason
or, rather, of their individual unreason, have laid hands on dogma,
have, in the very act, lost the spirit of charity; they have
excommunicated themselves.
The Catholic, that is to say the universal, dogma merits that
magnificent name by harmonizing in one all the religious aspirations of
the world; with Moses and Mohammed, it affirms the unity of God; with
Zoroaster, Hermes and Plato, it recognizes in Him the infinite trinity
of its own regeneration; {78} it reconciles the living numbers of
Pythagoras with the monadic Word of St. John;<
no space to continue with a demonstration that the Gospel legend itself
is a macedoine of those of Bacchus, Adonis, Osiris, and a hundred
others, and that the Mass, and Christian ceremonies generally, have
similarly pagan sources. --- O. M.>> so much, science and reason will
agree. It is then in the eyes of reason and of science themselves the
most perfect, that is to say the most complete, dogma which has ever
been produced in the world. Let science and reason grant us so much; we
shall ask nothing more of them.
   "God exists; there is only one God, and He punishes those who do
   evil," said Moses.
   "God is everywhere; He is in us, and the good that we do to me we do
   it to God," said Jesus.
   "Fear" is the conclusion of the dogma of Moses.
   "Love" is the conclusion of the dogma of Jesus.
   The typical ideal of the life of God in humanity is incarnation.
Incarnation necessitates redemption, and operates it in the name of the
reversibility of solidarity,<
the controversies of the period are to-day practically unintelligible.
Levi was at one time a kind of Socialist. --- TRANS.>> or, in other
words, of universal communion, the dogmatic principle of the spirit of
charity.
To substitute human arbitrament for the legitimate despotism of the
law, to put, in other words, tyranny in the place of authority, is the
work of all Protestantism and of all democracies. What men call liberty
is the sanction of illegitimate authority, or, rather, the fiction of
power not sanctioned by authority. {79}
John Calvin protested against the stakes of Rome, in order to give
himself the right to burn Michael Servetus. Every people that liberates
itself from a Charles I, or a Louis XVI, must undergo a Robespierre or
a Cromwell and there is a more or less absurd anti-pope being all
protestations against the legitimate papacy.
The divinity of Jesus Christ only exists in the Catholic Church, to
which He transmits hierarchically His life and His divine powers. This
divinity is sacerdotal and royal by virtue of communion; but outside of
that communion, every affirmation of the divinity of Jesus Christ is
idolatrous, because Jesus Christ could not be an isolated God.
The number of Protestants is of no importance to Catholic truth.
If all men were blind, would that be a reason for denying the existence
of the sun?
Reason, in protesting against dogma, proves sufficiently that she has
not invented it; but she is forced to admire the morality which results
from that dogma. Now, if morality is a light, it follows that dogma
must be a sun; light does not come from shadows.
Between the two abysses of polytheism, and an absurd and ignorant
theism, there is only one possible medium: the mystery of the most Holy
Trinity.
Between speculative theism, and anthropomorphiosm, there is only one
possible medium: the mystery of incarnation.
Between immoral fatality, and Draconic responsibility, which would
conclude the damnation of all beings, there is only one possible mean:
the mystery of redemption.
   The trinity is faith. {80}
   The incarnation is hope.
   The redemption is charity.
   The trinity is the hierarchy.
   Incarnation is the divine authority of the Church.
   Redemption is the unique, infallible, unfailing and Catholic
   priesthood.
The Catholic Church alone possesses an invariable dogma, and by its
very constitution is incapable of corrupting morality; she does not
make innovations, she explains. Thus, for example, the dogma of the
immaculate conception is not new; it was contained in the theotokon of
the Council of Ephesus, and the theotokon is a rigorous consequence of
the Catholic dogma of the incarnation.
In the same way the Catholic Church makes no excommunications, she
declares them; and she alone can declare them, because she alone is
guardian of unity.
Outside the vessel of Peter, there is nothing but the abyss.
Protestants are like people who have thrown themselves into the water
in order to escape sea-sickness.
It is of Catholicity, such as it is constituted in the Roman Church,
that one must say what Voltaire so boldly said of God: "If it did not
exist, it would be necessary to invent it." But if a man had been
capable of inventing the spirit of charity, he also would have invented
God. Charity does not invent itself, it reveals itself by its works,
and it is then that one can cry with the Saviour of the world: "Blessed
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!"
To understand the spirit of charity is to understand all mysteries.
{81}


ARTICLE IV
SOLUTION OF THE FOURTH PROBLEM
RELIGION PROVED BY THE OBJECTIONS WHICH PEOPLE
OPPOSE TO IT.
THE objections which one may make against religion may be made either
in the name of science, or in the name of reason, or in the name of
faith.
Science cannot deny the facts of the existence of religion, of its
establishment and its influence upon the events of history.
It is forbidden to it to touch dogma; dogma belongs wholly to faith.
Science ordinarily arms itself against religion with a series of facts
which it is her duty to appreciate, which, in fact, she does appreciate
thoroughly, but which she condemns still more energetically than
science does.
In doing that, science admits that religion is right, and herself
wrong; she lacks logic, manifests the disorder which every angry
passion introduces into the spirit of man, and admits the need that it
has of being ceaselessly redressed and directed by the spirit of
charity.
   Reason, on its side, examines dogma and finds it absurd.
   But, if it were not so, reason would understand it; if reason
   understood it, it would no longer be the formula of the unknown.
   {82}
   It would be a mathematical demonstration of the infinite.
   It would be the infinite finite, the unknown known, the immeasurable
   measured, the indicible named.
That is to say that dogma could only cease to be absurd in the eyes of
reason to become, in the eyes of faith, science, reason and good sense
in one, the most monstrous and the most impossible of all absurdities.
Remain the objections of dissent.
The Jews, our fathers in religion, reproach us with having attacked the
unity of God, with having changed the immutable and eternal law, with
adoring the creature instead of the Creator.
These heavy reproaches are founded on their perfectly false notion of
Christianity.
Our God is the God of Moses, unique, immaterial, infinite God, sole
object of worship, and ever the same.
Like the Jews, we believe Him to be present everywhere, but, as they
ought to do, we believe Him living, thinking and loving in humanity,
and we adore Him in His works.
We have not changed His law, for the Jewish Decalogue is also the law
of Christians.
The law is immutable because it is founded on the eternal principles of
Nature; but the worship necessitated by the needs of man may change,
and modify itself, parallel with the changes in men themselves.
This signifies that the worship itself is immutable, but modifies
itself as language does.
Worship is a form of instruction; it is a language; one must translate
it when nations no longer understand it. {83}
We have translated, and not destroyed, the worship of Moses and of the
prophets.
In adoring God in creation, we do not adore the creation itself.
In adoring God in Jesus Christ, it is God alone whom we adore, but God
united to humanity.
In making humanity divine, Christianity has revealed the human
divinity.
The God of the Jews was inhuman, because they did not understand Him in
His works.
We are, then, more Israelite than the Israelites themselves. What they
believe, we believe with them, and better than they do. They accuse us
of having separated ourselves from them, and, on the contrary, it is
they who wish to separate from us.
   We wait for them, the heart and the arms wide open.
   We are, as they are, the disciples of Moses.
   Like them, we come from Egypt, and we detest its slavery. But we
   have entered into the Promised Land, and they obstinately abide and
   die in the desert.
   Mohammedans are the bastards of Israel, or rather, they are his
   disinherited brothers, like Esau.
   Their belief is illogical, for they admit that Jesus is a great
   prophet, and they treat Christians as infidels.
   They recognize the Divine inspiration of Moses, yet they do not look
   upon the Jews as their brothers.
   They believe blindly in their blind prophet, the fatalist Mohammed,
   the enemy of progress and of liberty.
Nevertheless, do not let us take away from Mohammed the {84} glory of
having proclaimed the unity of God among the idolatrous Arabs.
   There are pure and sublime pages in the Quran.
   In reading those pages, one may say with the children of Ishmael,
   "There is no other God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet."
   There are three thrones in heaven for the three prophets of the
   nations; but, at the end of time, Mohammed will be replaced by
   Elias.
   The Mussulmans do not reproach the Christians; they insult them.
   They call them infidels and "giaours," that is to say, dogs. We have
   nothing to reply to them.
   One must not refute the Turks and the Arabs; one must instruct and
   civilize them.
Remain dissident Christians, that is to say, those who, having broken
the bond of unity, declare themselves strangers to the charity of the
Church.
Greek orthodoxy, that twin of the Roman Church which has not grown
greater since its separation, which counts no longer in religion,
which, since Photius, has not inspired a single eloquence, is a church
become entirely temporal, whose priesthood is no more than a function
regulated by the imperial policy of the Tsar of All the Russias; a
curious mummy of the primitive Church, still coloured and gilded with
all its legends and all its rites, which its popes no longer
understand; the shadow of a living church, but one which insisted on
stopping when that church moved on, and which is now no more than its
bloated-out and headless silhouette.
Then, the Protestants, those eternal regulators of anarchy, {85} who
have broken down dogma, and are trying always to fill the void with
reasonings, like the sieve of the Danaides; these weavers of religious
fantasy, all of whose innovations are negative, who have formulated for
their own use an unknown calling itself better known, mysteries better
explained, a more defined infinite, a more restrained immensity, a more
doubting faith, those who have quintessentialized the absurd, divided
charity, and taken acts of anarchy for the principles of an entirely
impossible hierarchy; those men who wish to realize salvation by faith
alone, because charity escapes them, and who can no longer realize it,
even upon the earth, for their pretended sacraments are no longer
anything but allegorical mummeries; they no longer give grace; they no
longer make God seen and touched; they are no longer, in a word, the
signs of the almighty power of faith, but the compelled witnesses of
the eternal impotence of doubt.
It is, then, against faith itself that the Reformation protested!
Protestants were right only in their protest against the inconsiderate
and persecuting zeal which wished to force consciences. They claimed
the right to doubt, the right to have less religion than others, or
even to have none at all; they have shed their blood for that sad
privilege; they conquered it, they possess it; but they will not take
away from us that of pitying them and loving them. When the need to
believe again takes them, when their heart revolts against the tyranny
of a falsified reason when they become tired of the empty abstractions
of their arbitrary dogma, of the vague observances of their ineffective
worship; when their communion without the real presence, their churches
without divinity, and their morality without grace finally frighten
{86} them; when they are sick with the nostalgia of God --- will they
not rise up like the prodigal son, and come to throw themselves at the
feet of the successor of Peter, saying: "Father, we have sinned against
heaven and in thy sight, and we are no more worthy to be called thy
sons, but count us among the humblest of thy servants"?
We will not speak of the criticism of Voltaire. That great mind was
dominated by an ardent love of truth and justice, but he lacked that
rectitude of heart which the intelligence of faith gives. Voltaire
could not admit faith, because he did not know how to love. The spirit
of charity did not reveal itself to that soul which had no tenderness,
and he bitterly criticized the hearth of which he did not feel the
warmth, and the lamp of which he did not see the light. If religion
were such as he saw it, he would have been a thousand times right to
attack it, and one would be obliged to fall on ones knees before the
heroism of his courage. Voltaire would be the Messiah of good sense,
the Hercules destructor of fanaticism. ... But he laughed too much to
understand Him who said: "Happy are they who weep," and the philosophy
of laughter will never have anything in common with the religion of
tears.
Voltaire parodied the Bible, dogma and worship; and then he mocked and
insulted that parody.
Only those who recognize religion in Voltaires parody can take offence
at it. The Voltaireans are like the frogs in the fable who leap upon
the log, and then make fun of royal majesty. They are at liberty to
take the log for a king, they are at liberty to make once more that
Roman caricature of which Tertullian once made mirth, that which
represented the {87} God of the Christians under the figure of a man
with an asss head. Christians will shrug their shoulders when they see
this knavery, and pray God for the poor ignorants who imagine that they
insult them.
M. the Count Joseph de Maistre, after having, in one of his most
eloquent paradoxes, represented the hangman as a sacred being, and a
permanent incarnation of divine justice upon earth, suggested that one
should raise to the old man of Ferney a statue executed by the hangman.
There is depth in this thought. Voltaire, in effect, also was, in the
world, a being at the same time providential and fatal, endowed with
insensibility for the accomplishment of his terrible functions. He was,
in the domain of intelligence, a hangman, an extirminator armed by the
justice of God Himself.
God sent Voltaire between the century of Bossuet and that of Napoleon
in order to destroy everything that separates those two geniuses and to
unite them in one alone.
He was the Samson of the spirit, always ready to shake the columns of
the temple; but in order to make him turn in spite of himself the mill
of religious progress, Providence made him blind of heart.

{88}

ARTICLE V
SOLUTION OF THE LAST PROBLEM

TO SEPARATE RELIGION FROM SUPERSTITION AND FANATICISM
SUPERSTITION, from the Latin word "superstes," surviving, is the sign
which survives the idea which it represents; it is the form preferred
to the thing, the rite without reason, faith become insensate through
isolating itself. It is in consequence the corpse of religion, the
death of life, stupefaction substituted for inspiration.
Fanaticism is superstition become passionate, its name comes from the
word "fanum," which signifies "temple," it is the temple put in place
of God, it is the human and temporal interest of the priest substituted
for the honour of priesthood, the wretched passion of the man
exploiting the faith of the believer.
In the fable of the ass loaded with relics, La Fontaine tells us that
the animal thought that he was being adored; he did not tell us that
certain people indeed thought that they were adoring the animal. These
people were the superstitious.
If any one had laughed at their stupidity, he would very likely have
been assassinated, for from superstition to fanaticism is only one
step.
Superstition is religion interpreted by stupidity; fanaticism is
religion serving as a pretext to fury.
Those who intentionally and maliciously confound religion {89} itself
with superstition and fanaticism, borrow from stupidity its blind
prejudices, and would borrow perhaps in the same way from fanaticism
its injustices and angers.
Inquisitors or Septembrisors,<
the Revolution of the 4^th September, 1792. --- TRANS.>> what matter
names? The religion of Jesus Christ condemns, and has always condemned,
assassins.
{90}


RESUME OF THE FIRST PART
IN THE FORM OF A DIALOGUE

FAITH, SCIENCE, REASON.
SCIENCE. You will never make me believe in the existence of God.
FAITH. You have not the privilege of believing, but you will never
prove to me that God does not exist.
SCIENCE. In order to prove it to you, I must first know what God is.
FAITH. You will never know it. If you knew it, you could teach it to
me; and when I knew it, I should no longer believe it.
SCIENCE. Do you then believe without knowing what you believe?
FAITH. Oh, do not let us play with words! It is you who do not know
what I believe, and I believe it precisely because you do not know it.
Do you pretend to be infinite? Are you not stopped at every step by
mystery? Mystery is for you an infinite ignorance which would reduce to
nothing your finite knowledge, if I did not illumine it with my burning
aspirations; and if, when you say, "I no longer know," I did not cry,
"As for me, I begin to believe."
SCIENCE. But your aspirations and their object are not (and cannot be
for me) anything but hypotheses. {91}
FAITH. Doubtless, but they are certainties for me, since without those
hypotheses I should be doubtful even about your certainties.
SCIENCE. But if you begin where I stop, you begin always too rashly and
too soon. My progress bears witness that I am ever advancing.
FAITH. What does your progress matter, if I am always walking in front
of you?
SCIENCE. You, walking! Dreamer of eternity, you have disdained earth
too much; your feet are benumbed.
FAITH. I make my children carry me.
SCIENCE. They are the blind carrying the blind; beware of precipices!
FAITH. No, my children are by no means blind; on the contrary, they
enjoy twofold sight: they see, by thine eyes, what thou canst show them
upon earth, and they contemplate, by mine, what I show them in Heaven.
SCIENCE. What does Reason think of it?
REASON. I think, my dear teachers, that you illustrate a touching
fable, that of the blind man and the paralytic. Science reproaches
Faith with not knowing how to walk upon the earth, and Faith says that
Science sees nothing of her aspirations and of eternity in the sky.
Instead of quarrelling, Science and Faith ought to unite; let Science
carry Faith, and let Faith console Science by teaching her to hope and
to love!
SCIENCE. It is a fine ideal, but Utopian. Faith will tell me
absurdities. I prefer to walk without her.
FAITH. What do you call absurdities?
SCIENCE. I call absurdities propositions contrary to my demonstrations;
as, for example, that three make one, that a {92} God has become man,
that is to say, that the Infinite has made itself finite, that the
Eternal died, that God punished his innocent Son for the sin of guilty
men. ...
FAITH. Say no more about it. As enunciated by you, these propositions
are in fact absurdities. Do you know what is the number of God, you who
do not know God? Can you reason about the operations of the unknown?
Can you understand the mysteries of charity? I must always be absurd
for you; for, if you understood them, my affirmations would be absorbed
by your theorems; I should be you, and you would be me; or, to put it
better, I should no longer exist, and Reason, in the presence of the
infinite, would halt, blinded for evermore by your doubts, which are as
infinite as space.
SCIENCE. At least, you should never usurp my authority, or give me the
lie in my own domains.
FAITH. I have never done so, and I could never do so.
SCIENCE. So! You have never believed, for example, that a virgin could
become a mother, without ceasing to be a virgin, in the physical,
natural, positive order of things, in spite of all the laws of Nature;
you do not affirm that a piece of bread is not only a God, but a real
human body with its bones and its veins, its organs, its blood; such,
in short, that you make of your children who eat this bread a little
race of cannibals.
FAITH. There is not a single Christian who would not be revolted by
what you have just said. That sufficiently proves that they do not
understand my teachings in this positive and gross sense. The
supernatural which I affirm is above Nature, and consequently could
never oppose itself to her; the words of Faith are understood only by
Faith; Science has only to repeat them to pervert their proper sense. I
employ these {93} words because I have no others; but since you find my
remarks absurd, you should conclude from that that I give to the same
words a meaning which escapes you. When the Saviour revealed the dogma
of the real presence, did he not say: "The flesh profiteth nothing, but
my words are spirit and life." I do not give you the mystery of the
incarnation for an anatomical phenomenon, nor that of
transubstantiation for a chemical manipulation. By what right do you
exclaim "Absurd!"? I do not reason about any of the things you know; by
what right do you say that I talk unreasonably?
SCIENCE. I begin to understand you, or rather, I see that I shall never
understand you. This being so, let us remain separate; I shall never
have need of you.
FAITH. I am less proud, and I recognize that you may be useful to me
perhaps. Perhaps, too, you will be very sad and very desperate without
me, and I will not leave you unless Reason consents.
REASON. Be well ware of doing so! I am necessary to both of you. And
I, what should I do without you? In order to be just, I need to know
and to believe. But I must never confound what I know with what I
believe. To know is to believe no longer; to believe is not to know as
yet. The object of Science is the known; Faith does not occupy itself
with that, and leaves it all to Science. The object of Faith is the
unknown; Science may seek it, but not define it; she is then obliged,
at least provisionally, to accept the definitions of Faith which it is
impossible for her even to criticize. Only, if Science renounces Faith,
she renounces hope and love, whose existence and necessity are as
evident for Science as for Faith. Faith, as a psychological fact,
pertains to the realm of {94} Science; and Science, as the
manifestation of the light of God within the human intelligence,
pertains to the realm of Faith. Science and Faith must then admit each
other, respect each other mutually, support each other, and bear each
other aid in case of need, but without ever encroaching the one upon
the other. The means of uniting them is --- never to confound them.
Never can there be contradiction between them, for although they use
the same words,, they do not speak the same language.
FAITH. Oh, well, Sister Science; what do you say about it?
SCIENCE. I say that we are separated by a deplorable misunderstanding,
and that henceforward we shall be able to walk together. But to which
of your different creeds do you wish to attach me? Shall I be Jewish,
Catholic, Mohammedan, or Protestant?
   FAITH. You will remain Science, and you will be universal.
   SCIENCE. That is to say, Catholic, if I understand you correctly.
   But what should I think of the different religions?
   FAITH. Judge them by their works. Seek true Charity, and when you
   have found her, ask her to which religion she belongs.
   SCIENCE. It is certainly not to that of the Inquisition, and of the
   authors of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.
FAITH. It is to that of St. John the Almoner, of St. Francois de
Sales,<
He accepted him without perusal, as the Englishman accepts Shakespeare
and Milton. --- O. M.>> of St. Vincent de Paul, of Fenelon, and so many
more. {95}
SCIENCE. Admit that if religion has produced much good, she has also
done much evil.
FAITH. When one kills in the name of the God who said, "Thou shalt not
kill,"<
of children. 1 Sam. xv. 3, etc. --- O. M.>> when one persecutes in the
name of Him who commands us to forgive our enemies, when one propagates
darkness in the name of Him who tells us not to hide the light under a
bushel, is it just to attri bute the crime to the very law which
condemns it? Say, if you wish to be just, that in spite of religion,
much evil has been done upon earth. But also, to how many virtues has
it not given birth? How many are the devotions, how many the
sacrifices, of which we do not know! Have you counted those noble
hearts, both men and women, who renounced all joys to enter the service
of all sorrows? Those souls devoted to labour and to prayer, who have
strewn their pathways with good deeds? Who founded asylums for orphans
and old men, hospitals for the sick, retreats for the repentant? These
institutions, as glorious as they are modest, are the real works with
which the annals of the Church are filled; religious wars and the
persecution of heretics belong to the politics of savage centuries. The
heretics, moreover, were themselves murderers. Have you forgotten the
burning of Michael Servetus and the massacre of our priests, renewed,
still in the name of humanity and reason, by the revolutionaries who
hated the Inquisition and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew? Men are
always cruel, it is true, but only when they forget the religion whose
watchwords are blessing and pardon.
SCIENCE. O Faith! Pardon me, then, if I cannot believe; {96} but I know
now why you believe. I respect your hopes, and share your desires. But
I must find by seeking; and in order to seek, I must doubt.
REASON. Work, then, and seek, O Science, but respect the oracles of
Faith! When your doubt leaves a gap in universal enlightenment, allow
Faith to fill it! Walk distinguished the one from the other, but
leaning the one upon the other, and you will never go astray.
{97}



PART II
PHILOSOPHICAL MYSTERIES

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
   IT has been said that beauty is the splendour of truth.
   Now moral beauty is goodness. It is beautiful to be good.
   To be intelligently good, one must be just.
   To be just, one must act reasonably.
   To act reasonably, one must have the knowledge of reality.
   To have the knowledge of reality, one must have consciousness of
   truth.
   To have consciousness of truth, one must have an exact notion of
   being.
Being, truth, reason and justice are the common objects of the
researches of science, and of the aspirations of faith. The
conceptions, whether real or hypothetical, of a supreme power transform
justice into Providence; and the notion of divinity, from this point of
view, becomes accessible to science herself.
Science studies Being in its partial manifestation; faith supposes it,
or rather admits it "a priori" as a whole.
Science seeks the truth in everything; faith refers everything to an
universal and absolute truth.
Science records realities in detail: faith explains them by {98}
totalized reality to which science cannot bear witness, but which the
very existence of the details seems to force her to recognize and to
admit.
Science submits the reasons of persons and things to the universal
mathematical reason; faith seeks, or rather supposes, an intelligent
and absolute reason for (and above) mathematics themselves.
Science demonstrates justice by justness; faith gives an absolute
justness to justice, in subordinating it to Providence.
One sees here all that faith borrows from science, and all that
science, in its turn, owes to faith.
Without faith, science is circumscribed by an absolute doubt, and finds
itself eternally penned within the risky empiricism of a reasoning
scepticism; without science, faith constructs its hypotheses at random,
and can only blindly prejudge the causes of the effects of which she is
ignorant.
The great chain which reunites science and faith is analogy.
Science is obliged to respect a belief whose hypotheses are analogous
to demonstrated truths. Faith, which attri butes everything to God, is
obliged to admit science as being a natural revelation which, by the
partial manifestation of the laws of eternal reason, gives a scale of
proportion to all the aspirations and to all the excursions of the soul
into the domain of the unknown.
It is, then, faith alone that can give a solution to the mysteries of
science; and in return, it is science alone that demonstrates the
necessity of the mysteries of faith.
Outside the union and the concourse of these two living forces of the
intelligence, there is for science nothing but {99} scepticism and
despair, for faith nothing but rashness and fanaticism.
If faith insults science, she blasphemes; if science misunderstand
faith, she abdicates.
Now let us hear them speak in harmony!
"Being is everywhere," says science. "it is multiple and variable in
its forms, unique in its essence, and immutable in its laws. The
relative demonstrates the existence of the absolute. Intelligence
exists in being. Intelligence animates and modifies matter."
"Intelligence is everywhere," says faith; "Life is nowhere fatal
because it is ruled. This rule is the expression of supreme Wisdom. The
absolute in intelligence, the supreme regulator of forms, the living
ideal of spirits, is God."
   "In its identity with the ideal, being is truth," says science.
   "In its identity with the ideal, truth is God," replies faith.
   "In its identity with my demonstrations, being is reality," says
   science.
   "In its identity with my legitimate aspirations, reality is my
   dogma," says faith.
   "In its identity with the Word, being is reason," says science.
   "In its identity with the spirit of charity, the highest reason is
   my obedience," says faith.
   "In its identity with the motive of reasonable acts, being is
   justice," says science.
   "In its identity with the principle of charity, justice is
   Providence," replies faith.
Sublime harmony of all certainties with all hopes, of the {100}
absolute in intelligence with the absolute in love! The Holy Spirit,
the spirit of charity, should then conciliate all, and transform all
into His own light. Is it not the spirit of intelligence, the spirit of
science, the spirit of counsel, the spirit of force? "He must come,"
says the Catholic liturgy, "and it will be, as it were, a new creation;
and He will change the face of the earth."
"To laugh at philosophy is already to philosophize," said Pascal,
referring to that sceptical and incredulous philosophy which does not
recognize faith. And if there existed a faith which trampled science
underfoot, we should not say that to laugh at such a faith would be a
true act of religion, for religion, which is all charity, does not
tolerate mockery; but one would be right in blaming this love for
ignorance, and in saying to this rash faith, "Since you slight your
sister, you are not the daughter of God!"
Truth, reality, reason, justice, Providence, these are the five rays of
the flamboyant star in the centre of which science will write the word
"being," --- to which faith will add the ineffable name of God.

SOLUTION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL
PROBLEMS
FIRST SERIES
   QUESTION. What is truth?
   ANSWER. Idea identical with being. {101}<
   confusion of map with territory.>>
   Q. What is reality?
   A. Knowledge identical with being.
   Q. What is reason?
   A. The Word identical with being.
   Q. What is justice?
   A. The motive of acts identical with being.
   Q. What is the absolute?
   A. Being.
   Q. Can one conceive anything superior to being?
   A. No; but one conceives in being itself something supereminent and
   transcendental.
   Q. What is that?
   A. The supreme reason of being.
   Q. Do you know it, and can you define it?
   A. Faith alone affirms it, and names it God.
   Q. Is there anything above truth?
   A. Above known truth, there is unknown truth.
   Q. How can one construct reasonable hypotheses with regard to this
   truth?
   A. By analogy and proportion.
   Q. How can one define it?
   A. By the symbols of faith.
   Q. Can one say of reality the same thing as of truth?
   A. Exactly the same thing.
   Q. Is there anything above reason?
   A. Above finite reason, there is infinite reason.
   Q. What is infinite reason?
A. It is that supreme reason of being that faith calls God.<
This is the characteristic phrase of the philosophy of 18^th century
enlightenment: "God is Reason" --- also the characteristic error. 19^th
century philosophy continued this into Determinism and the now
discredited concept of "Natural Law".>>
Q. Is there anything above justice? {102}
   A. Yes; according to faith, there is the Providence of God, and the
   sacrifice of man.
   Q. What is this sacrifice?
   A. It is the willing and spontaneous surrender of right.
   Q. Is this sacrifice reasonable?
   A. No; it is a kind of folly greater than reason, for reason is
   forced to admire it.
   Q. How does one call a man who acts according to truth, reality,
   reason and justice?
   A. A moral man.
   Q. And if he sacrifices his interests to justice?
   A. A man of honour.
   Q. And if in order to imitate the grandeur and goodness of
   Providence he does more than his duty, and sacrifices his right to
   the good of others?
   A. A hero.
   Q. What is the principle of true heroism?
   A. Faith.
   Q. What is its support?
   A. Hope.
   Q. And its rule?
   A. Charity.
   Q. What is the Good?
   A. Order.
   Q. What is the Evil?
   A. Disorder.
   Q. What is permissible pleasure?
   A. Enjoyment of order.
   Q. What is forbidden pleasure?
   A. Enjoyment of disorder. {103}
   Q. What are the consequences of each?
   A. Moral life and moral death.
   Q. Has then hell, with all its horrors, its justification in
   religious dogma?
   A. Yes; it is a rigorous consequence of a principle.
   Q. What is this principle?
   A. Liberty.
   Q. What is liberty?
   A. The right to do ones duty, with the possibility of not doing it.
   Q. What is failing in ones duty?
   A. It involves the loss of ones right. Now, right being eternal, to
   lose it is to suffer an eternal loss.
   Q. Can one repair a fault?
   A. Yes; by expiation.
   Q. What is expiation?
   A. Working overtime. Thus, because I was lazy yesterday, I had to do
   a double task to-day.
   Q. What are we to think of those who impose on themselves voluntary
   sufferings?
A. If they do so in order to overcome the brutal fascination of
pleasure, they are wise; if to suffer instead of others, they are
generous; but if they do it without discretion and without measure,
they are imprudent.
   Q. Thus, in the eyes of true philosophy, religion is wise in all
   that it ordains?
   A. You see that it is so.
   Q. But if, after all, we were deceived in our eternal hopes?
A. Faith does not admit that doubt. But philosophy herself should reply
that all the pleasures of the earth are not {104} worth one day of
wisdom, and that all the triumphs of ambition are not worth a single
minute of heroism and of charity.

SECOND SERIES
   QUESTION. What is man?
   ANSWER. Man is an intelligent and corporeal being made in the image
   of God and of the world, one in essence, triple in substance, mortal
   and immortal.
   Q. You say, "triple in substance." Has man, then, two souls or two
   bodies?
   A. No; there is in him a spiritual soul, a material body, and a
   plastic medium.
   Q. What is the substance of this medium?
   A. Light, partially volatile, and partially fixed.
   Q. What is the volatile part of this light?
A. Magnetic fluid.<
Newton, Mesmer and others to quantify the astral body. 18^th and 19^th
century efforts to measure ectoplasm, oddic force, etc. and to
physically measure an essence of life have persisted to the verge of
the 21^st century in a strange pseudo-science. At least in the 18^th
and 19^th centuries there was the idea of the luminous Aeyther as a
partial justification for this sort of thing. Now it is generally
considered a curiosity dependent on subjective measurement without the
objective external instrumentation required by hard science. This
concept has led to a vast array of quack medical theories and the loss
of otherwise promising philosophies. Bulwar Lytton used the idea; W.
Reich was imprisoned for trying to cure with it. Crowley lost much time
over it in his later years in trying to market his Amrita derivations.
The future may disclose some substance here, but it tends to "confusion
of the planes" more often than not.>>
   Q. And the fixed part?
   A. The fluidic or fragrant body.
   Q. Is the existence of this body demonstrated?
   A. Yes; by the most curious and the most conclusive experiences. We
   shall speak of them in the third part of this work.
   Q. Are these experiences articles of faith?
A. No, they pertain to science.<
essential to Thelema, Crowleys dependence on it is a measure of his
place in time. "The Method of Science. The Aim of Religion." --- A
valid perspective, but not without potential for misapplication. This,
more than anything else, is the influence of Levi on Crowleys
philosophy. Accidents of emphasis in Levis works often became seeds
for fruitless avenues of research in Crowleys effort.>>
Q. But will science preoccupy herself with it?
A. She already preoccupies herself with it. We have written this book
and you are reading it.
Q. Give us some notions of this plastic medium.
A. It is formed of astral or terrestrial light, and transmits {105} the
double magnetization of it to the human body. The soul, by acting on
this light through its volitions, can dissolve it or coagulate it,
project it or withdraw it. It is the mirror of the imagination and of
dreams. It reacts upon the nervous system, and thus produces the
movements of the body. This light can dilate itself indefinitely, and
communicate its reflections at considerable distances; it magnetizes
the bodies submitted to the action of man, and can, by concentrating
itself, again draw them to him. It can take all the forms evoked by
thought, and, in the transitory coagulations of its radiant particles,
appear to the eyes; it can even offer a sort of resistance to the
touch. But these manifestations and uses of the plastic medium being
abnormal, the luminous instrument of precision cannot produce them
without being strained, and there is danger of either habitual
hallucination, or of insanity.
Q. What is animal magnetism?
A. The action of one plastic medium upon another, in order to dissolve
or coagulate it. By augmenting the elasticity of the vital light and
its force of projection, one sends it forth as far as one will, and
withdraws it completely loaded with images; but this operation must be
favoured by the slumber of the subject, which one produces by
coagulating still further the fixed part of his medium.
   Q. Is magnetism contrary to morality and religion?
   A. Yes, when one abuses it.
   Q. In what does the abuse of it consist?
   A. In employing it in a disordered manner, or for a disordered
   object.
   Q. What is a disordered magnetism? {106}
   A. An unwholesome fluidic emission, made with a bad intention; for
   example, to know the secrets of others, or to arrive at unworthy
   ends.
   Q. What is the result of it?
A. It puts out of order the fluidic instrument of precision, both in
the case of the magnetizer and of the magnetized. To this cause one
must attri bute the immoralities and the follies with which a great
number of those who occupy themselves with magnetism are reproached.
Q. What conditions are required in order to magnetize properly?
A. Health of spirit and body; right intention, and discreet practice.
Q. What advantageous results can one obtain by discreet magnetism?
A. The cure of nervous diseases, the analysis of presentiments, the re-
establishment of fluidic harmonies, and the rediscovery of certain
secrets of Nature.
Q. Explain that to us in a more complete manner.
A. We shall do so in the third part of this work, which will treat
specially of the mysteries of Nature.
{107}


PART III
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE

THE GREAT MAGICAL AGENT
WE have spoken of a substance extended in the infinite.
{Illustration on page 108 described:
This is sub-titled below "THE TENTH KEY OF THE TAROT".
It is a type of the Wheel of Fortune. The wheel itself is erected on a
wooden post, and has a crank affixed to the hub. There is no image of
Fortuna to turn it. The base of the post is held by a blunt double
crescent on the ground, rounded horns slightly up and in parallel like
a hot-dog bun. Two nosed serpents issue from the base, cross once and
arch toward the post just below the wheel. The wheel is double, having
an outer and an inner ring with eight spokes running through both rims.
The spokes have a circular expansion with central hole inside and a bit
short of the inner rim. These spokes appear to be riveted to the inner
rim. At the top of the wheel is the Nemesis seated on a platform as a
sphinx with a sword: head cloth, stern male face and womans breasts,
winged. The sword is hilt to wheel and up to left. "ARCHEE" is written
over the wing to the left. Risking on the right of the wheel is a
Hermanubus or variation of Serapis: Dogs head, human body, carries a
caduceus half hidden behind head and wheel, legs before wheel. "AZOTH"
is written above the head of this figure. A demon reminiscent of
Proteus descends the wheel on the left. His head is bearded and horned,
his legs are tentacular and finned. He carries a trident below. "HYLE"
is written below his head.}
That substance is one which is heaven and earth; that is to say,
according to its degrees of polarization, subtle or fixed. {108}
This substance is what Hermes Trismegistus calls the great "Telesma."
When it produces splendour, it is called Light.
   It is this substance which God creates before everything else, when
   He says, "Let there be light."
   It is at once substance and movement.
   It is fluid, and a perpetual vibration.
   Its inherent force which set it is motion is called "magnetism."
   In the infinite, this unique substance is the ether, or the etheric
   light.
   In the stars which it magnetizes, it becomes astral light.
   In organized beings, light, or magnetic fluid.
   In man it forms the "astral body," or the "plastic medium."
   The will of intelligent beings acts directly on this light, and by
   means of it on all that part of Nature which is submitted to the
   modifications of intelligence.
This light is the common mirror of all thoughts and all forms; it
preserves the images of everything that has been, the reflections of
past worlds, and, by analogy, the sketches of worlds to come. It is the
instrument of thaumaturgy and divination, as remains for us to explain
in the third and last part of this work. {109}


FIRST BOOK
MAGNETIC MYSTERIES

CHAPTER I
THE KEY OF MESMERISM
MESMER rediscovered the secret science of Nature; he did not invent it.
The first unique and elementary substance whose existence he proclaims
in his aphorisms, was known by Hermes and Pythagoras.
Synesius, who sings it in his hymns, had found it revealed in the
Platonistic records of the School of Alexandria:
   GR:Mu-iota-alpha pi-alpha-gamma-alpha mu-iota-alpha
   rho-iota-zeta-alpha
   Tau-rho-iota-phi-alpha-eta-sigma
   epsilon-lambda-alpha-mu-pi-epsilon
   mu-omicron-rho-phi-alpha
. . . . . . .
   Pi-epsilon-rho-iota gamma-alpha-rho
   sigma-pi-alpha-rho-epsilon-iota-sigma-alpha
   pi-nu-omicron-iota-alpha
   Chi-theta-omicron-nu-omicron-sigma
   epsilon-zeta-omega-omega-sigma-epsilon
   mu-omicron-iota-rho-alpha-sigma
   Pi-omicron-lambda-upsilon-delta-alpha-iota-delta-alpha-
   lambda omicron-iota-sigma-iota
   mu-omicron-rho-alpha-iota-sigma
"A single source, a single root of light, jets out and spreads itself
into three branches of splendour. A breath blows round the earth, and
vivifies in innumerable forms all parts of animated substance." (HYMN
II --- "Synesius.")
Mesmer saw in elementary matter a substance indifferent to movement as
to rest. Submitted to movement, it is volatile; fallen back into rest,
it is fixed; and he did not understand that movement is inherent in the
first substance; that it results, not from its indifference, but from
its aptitude, combined with a movement and a rest which are
equilibrated {110} the one by the other; that absolute rest is nowhere
in universal living matter, but that the fixed attracts the volatile in
order to fix it; while the volatile attacks the fixed in order to
volatilize it. That the supposed rest of particles apparently fixed, in
nothing but a more desperate struggle and a greater tension of their
fluidic forces. which by neutralizing each other make themselves
immobile. It is thus that, as Hermes says, that which is above is like
that which is below; the same force which expands steam, contracts and
hardens the icicle;<
exception. Because of its unusual properties, water expands when it
freezes. Much of this section reprises the kinetic theories of
Thermodynamics, recently demonstrated in the time preceding Levis
writings. These theories are here united to the ideas described by
Macrobius and attri buted to the ancients.>> everything obeys the laws
of life which are inherent in the original substance; this substance
attracts and repels, in coagulates itself and dissolves itself, with a
constant harmony; it is double; it is androgynous; it embraces itself,
and fertilizes itself, it struggles, triumphs, destroys, renews; but
never abandons itself to inertia, because inertia, for it, would be
death.
It is this original substance to which the hieratic recital of Genesis
refers when the word of Elohim creates light by commanding it to exist.
The Elohim said, "Let there be light!" and there was light.
This light, whose Hebrew name is HB:Aleph-Vau-Resh, "aour," is the
fluidic and living gold of the hermetic philosophy. Its positive
principle is their sulphur; its negative principle, their mercury; and
its equilibrated principles form what they call their salt.
One must then, in place of the sixth aphorism of Mesmer which reads
thus: "Matter is indifferent as to whether it is in movement or at
rest," establish this proposition: "The universal matter is compelled
to movement by its double magnetization, and its fate is to seek
equilibrium." {111}
Whence one may deduce these corollaries:
Regularity and variety in movement result from the different
combinations of equilibrium.
A point equilibrated on all sides remains at rest, for the very reason
that it is endowed with motion.
Fluid consists of rapidly moving matter, always stirred by the
variation of the balancing forces.
A solid is the same matter in slow movement, or at apparent rest
because it is more or less solidly balanced.
There is no solid body which would not immediately be pulverized,
vanish in smoke, and become invisible if the equilibrium of its
molecules were to cease suddenly.
There is no fluid which would not instantly become harder than the
diamond, if one could equilibrate its constituent molecules.<
These observations betray an understandably inadequate knowledge of
Thermodymanics.>>
To direct the magnetic forces is then to destroy or create forms; to
produce to all appearance, or to destroy bodies; it is to exercise the
almighty power of Nature.
Our plastic medium is a magnet which attracts or repels the astral
light under the pressure of the will. It is a luminous body which
reproduces with the greatest ease forms corresponding to ideas.
It is the mirror of the imagination. This body is nourished by astral
light just as the organic body is nourished by the products of the
earth. During slumber, it absorbs the astral light by immersion, and
during waking, by a kind of somewhat slow respiration. When the
phenomena of natural somnambulism are produced, the plastic medium is
surcharged with ill-digested nourishment. The will, although bound by
the torpor of slumber, repels instinctively the medium {112} towards
the organs in order to disengage it, and a reaction, of mechanical
nature, takes place, which with the movement of the body equilibrates
the light of the medium. It is for that reason that it {is} so
dangerous to wake somnambulists suddenly, for the gorged medium may
then withdraw itself suddenly towards the common reservoir, and abandon
the organs altogether; these are then separated from the soul, and
death is the result.
The state of somnambulism, whether natural or artificial, is then
extremely dangerous, because in uniting the phenomena of the waking
state and the state of slumber, it constitutes a sort of straddle
between two worlds. The soul moves the springs of the particular life
while bathing itself in the universal life, and experiences an
inexpressible sense of well-being; it will then willingly let go the
nervous branches which hold it suspended above the current. In
ecstasies of every kind the situation is the same. If the will plunges
into it with a passionate effort, or even abandons itself entirely to
it, the subject may become insane or paralysed, or even die.
Hallucinations and vision result from wounds inflicted on the plastic
medium, and from its local paralysis. Sometimes it ceases to give forth
rays, and substitutes images condensed somehow or other to realities
shown by the light; sometimes it radiates with too much force, and
condense itself outside and around some chance and irregulated nucleus,
as blood does in some bodily growths. Then the chimeras of our brain
take on a body, and seem to take on a soul; we appear to ourselves
radiant or deformed according to the image of the ideal of our desires,
or our fears.
Hallucinations, being the dreams of waking persons, {113} always imply
a state analogous to somnambulism. But in a contrary sense;
somnambulism is slumber borrowing its phenomena from waking;
hallucination is waking still partially subjected to the astral
intoxication of slumber.
Our fluidic bodies attract and repulse each other following laws
similar to those of electricity. It is this which produces instinctive
sympathies and antipathies. They thus equilibrate each other, and for
this reason hallucinations are often contagious; abnormal projections
change the luminous currents; the perturbation caused by a sick person
wins over to itself the more sensitive natures; a circle of illusions
is established, and a whole crowd of people is easily dragged away
thereby. Such is the history of strange apparitions and popular
prodigies. Thus are explained the miracles of the American mediums and
the hysterics of table-turners, who reproduce in our own times the
ecstasies of whirling dervishes. The sorcerers of Lapland with their
magic drums, and the conjurer medicine-men of savages arrive at similar
results by similar proceedings; their gods or their devils have nothing
to do with it.
Madmen and idiots are more sensitive to magnetism than people of sound
minds; it should be easy to understand the reason of that: very little
is required to turn completely the head of a drunken man, and one more
easily acquires a disease when all the organs are predisposed to submit
to its impressions, and manifest its disorders.<
predates the general acceptance of the germ theory of disease.>>
Fluidic maladies have their fatal crises. Every abnormal tension of the
nervous apparatus ends in the contrary tension, according to the
necessary laws of equilibrium. An exaggerated love changes to aversion,
and every exalted hate comes very {114} near to love; the reaction
happens suddenly with the flame and violence of the thunderbolt.
Ignorance then laments it or exclaims against it; science resigns
itself, and remains silent.
There are two loves, that of the heart, and that of the head: the love
of the heart never excites itself, it gathers itself together, and
grows slowly by the path of ordeal and sacrifice; purely nervous and
passionate cerebral love lives only on enthusiasm, dashes itself
against all duties, treats the beloved object as a prize of conquest,
is selfish, exacting, restless, tyrannical, and is fated to drag after
it either suicide as the final catastrophe, or adultery as a remedy.
These phenomena are constant like nature, inexorable as fatality.
A young artist full of courage, with her future all before her, had a
husband, an honest man, a seeker after knowledge, a poet, whose only
fault was an excess of love for her; she outraged him and left him, and
has continued to hate him ever since. Yet she, too, is a decent woman;
the pitiless world, however, judges and condemns her. And yet, this was
not her crime. Her fault, if one may be permitted to reproach her with
one, was that, at first, she madly and passionately loved her husband.
"But," you will say, "is not the human soul, then, free?" No, it is no
longer free when it has abandoned itself to the giddiness caused by
passion. It is only wisdom which is free; disordered passions are the
kingdom of folly, and folly is fatality.
What we have said of love may equally well be said of religion, which
is the most powerful, but also the most intoxicating, of all loves.
Religious passion has also its excesses {115} and its fatal reactions.
One may have ecstasies and stigmata like St. Francis of Assisi, and
fall afterwards into abysses of debauch and impiety.
Passionate natures are highly charged magnets; they attract or repel
with violence.
It is possible to magnetize in two ways: first, in acting by will upon
the plastic medium of another person, whose will and whose acts are, in
consequence, subordinated to that action.
Secondly, in acting through the will of another, either by
intimidation, or by persuasion, so that the influenced will modifies at
our pleasure the plastic medium and the acts of that person.
   One magnetizes by radiation, by contact, by look, or by word.
   The vibrations of the voice modify the movement of the astral light,
   and are a powerful vehicle of magnetism.
   The warm breath magnetizes positively, and the cold breath
   negatively.
A warm and prolonged insufflation upon the spinal column at the base of
the cerebellum may occasion erotic phenomena.
If one puts the right hand upon the head and the left hand under the
feet of a person completely enveloped with wool or silk, one causes the
magnetic spark to pass completely through the body, and one may thus
occasion a nervous revolution in his organism with the rapidity of
lightning.
Magnetic passes only serve to direct the will of the magnetizer in
confirming it by acts. They are signs and nothing more. The act of the
will is expressed and not operated by these signs. {116}
Powdered charcoal absorbs and retains the astral light. This explains
the magic mirror of Dupotet.
Figures traced in charcoal appear luminous to a magnetized person, and
take, for him, following the direction indicated by the will of the
magnetizer, the most gracious or the most terrifying forms.
The astral light, or rather the vital light, of the plastic medium,
absorbed by the charcoal, becomes wholly negative; for this reason
animals which are tormented by electricity, as for example, cats, love
to roll themselves upon coal.<
carbon removes unpleasant static electricity.>> One day, medicine will
make use of this property, and nervous persons will find great relief
from it.

CHAPTER II
LIVE AND DEATH. --- SLEEP AND WAKING
   SLEEP is an incomplete death; death is a complete sleep.
   Nature subjects us to sleep in order to accustom us to the idea of
   death, and warns us by dreams of the persistence of another life.
The astral light into which sleep plunges us is like an ocean in which
innumerable images are afloat, flotsam of wrecked existences, mirages
and reflections of those which pass, presentiments of those which are
about to be.
Our nervous disposition attracts to us those images which correspond to
our agitation, to the nature of our fatigue, just as a magnet, moved
among particles of various metals, would attract to itself and choose
particularly the iron filings. {117}
Dreams reveal to us the sickness or the health, the calm or the
disturbance, of our plastic medium, and consequently, also, that of our
nervous apparatus.
They formulate our presentiments by the analogy which the images bear
to them.
For all ideas have a double significance for us, relating to our double
life.
There exists a language of sleep; in the waking state it is impossible
to understand it, or even to order its words.
   The language of slumber is that of nature, hieroglyphic in its
   character, and rhythmical in its sounds.
   Slumber may be either giddy or lucid.
   Madness is a permanent state of vertiginous somnambulism.
   A violent disturbance may wake madmen to sense, or kill them.
   Hallucinations, when they obtain the adhesion of the intelligence,
   are transitory attacks of madness.
Every mental fatigue provokes slumber; but if the fatigue is
accompanied by nervous irritation, the slumber may be incomplete, and
take on the character of somnambulism.
One sometimes goes to sleep without knowing it in the midst of real
life; and then instead of thinking, one dreams.
How is it that we remember things which have never happened to us?
Because we dreamt them when wide awake.
This phenomenon of involuntary and unperceived sleep when it suddenly
traverses real life, often happens to those who over-excite their
nervous organism by excesses either of work, vigil, drink, or erethism.
{118}
Monomaniacs are asleep when they perform unreasonable acts. They no
longer remember anything on waking.
When Papvoine was arrested by the police, he calmly said to them these
remarkable words: "You are taking the other for me."
It was the somnambulist who was still speaking.
Edgar Poe, that unhappy man of genius who used to intoxicate himself,
has terribly described the somnambulism of monomaniacs. Sometimes it is
an assassin who hears, and who thinks that everybody hears, through the
wall of the tomb, the beating of his victims heart; sometimes it is a
poisoner who, by dint of saying to himself, "I am safe, provided I do
not go and denounce myself," ends by dreaming aloud that he is
denouncing himself, and in fact does so. Edgar Poe himself invented
neither the persons nor the facts of these strange novels; he dreamt
them waking, and that is why he clothed them so well with all the
colours of a shocking reality.
Dr. Briere de Boismont in his remarkable work on "Hallucinations,"
tells the story of an Englishman otherwise quite sane, who thought that
he had met a stranger and made his acquaintance, who took him to lunch
at his tavern, and then having asked him to visit St. Pauls in his
company, had tried to throw him from the top of the tower which they
had climbed together.<
anecdotes into his stories.>>
From that moment the Englishman was obsessed by this stranger, whom he
alone could see, and whom he always met when he was alone, and had
dined well.
Precipices attract; drunkenness calls to drunkenness; madness has
invincible charms for madness. When a man {119} succumbs to sleep, he
holds in horror everything which might wake him. It is the same with
the hallucinated, with statical somnambulists, maniacs, epileptics, and
all those who abandon themselves to the delirium of a passion. They
have heard the fatal music, they have entered into the dance of death;
and they feel themselves dragged away into the whirl of vertigo. You
speak to them, they no more hear you; you warn them, they no longer
understand you, but your voice annoys them; they are asleep with the
sleep of death.
Death is a current which carries you away, a whirlpool which draws you
down, but from the bottom of which the least movement may make you
climb again. The force or repulsion being equal to that of attraction,
at the very moment of expiring, one often attaches oneself again
violent to life. Often also, by the same law of equilibrium, one passes
from sleep to death through complaisance for sleep.
A shallop sways upon the shores of the lake. The child enters the
water, which, shining with a thousand reflections, dances around him
and calls him; the chain which retains the boat stretches and seems to
wish to break itself; then a marvellous bird shoots out from the bank,
and skims, singing, upon the joyous waves; the child wishes to follow
it, he puts his hand upon the chain, he detaches the ring.
Antiquity divined the mystery of the attraction of death, and
represented it in the fable of Hylas. Weary with a long voyage, Hylas
has arrived in a flowered, enamelled isle; he approaches a fountain to
draw water; a gracious mirage smiles at him; he sees a nymph stretch
out her arms to him, his own lose nerve, and cannot draw back the heavy
jar; the fresh fragrance of the spring put him to sleep; the perfumes
{120} of the bank intoxicate him. There he is, bent over the water like
a narcissus whose stalk has been broken by a child at play; the full
jar falls to the bottom, and Hylas follows it; he dies, dreaming that
nymphs caress him, and no longer hears the voice of Hercules recalling
him to the labours of life; Hercules, who runs wildly everywhere,
crying, "Hylas! Hylas!"
Another fable, not less touching, which steps forth from the shadows of
the Orphic initiation, is that of Eurydice recalled to life by the
miracles of harmony and love, of Eurydice, that sensitive broken on the
very day of her marriage, who takes refuge in the tomb, trembling with
modesty. Soon she hears the lyre of Orpheus, and slowly climbs again
towards the light; the terrible divinities of Erebus dare not bar her
passage. She follows the poet, or rather the poetry which adores. ...
But, woe to the lover if he changes the magnetic current and pursues in
his turn, with a single look, her whom he should only attract! The
sacred love, the virginal love, the love which is stronger than the
tomb, seeks only devotion, and flies in terror before the egoism of
desire. Orpheus knows it; but, for an instant, he forgets it. Eurydice,
in her white bridal dress, lies upon the marriage bed; he wears the
vestments of Grand Hierophant, he stands upright, his lyre in his hand,
his head crowned with the sacred laurel, his eyes turned towards the
East, and he sings. He sings of the luminous arrows of love that
traverse the shadows of old Chaos, the waves of soft, clear light,
flowing from the black teats of the mother of the gods, from which hang
the two children, Eros and Anteros. He says the song of Adonis
returning to life in answer to the complaint of Venus, reviving like a
flower under the shining dew of her {121} tears; the song of Castor and
Pollux, whom death could not divide, and who love alternately in hell
and upon earth. ... Then he calls softly Eurydice, his dear Eurydice,
his so much loved Eurydice:
   Ah! miseram Eurydicen anima fugiente vocabat,
   Eurydicen! toto referebant flumine ripae.
While he sings, that pallid statue of the sculptor death takes on the
colour of the first tint of life, its white lips begin to redden like
the dawn ... Orpheus sees her, he trembles, he stammers, the hymn
almost dies upon his lips, but she pales anew; then the Grand
Hierophant tears from his lyre sublime heartrending songs, he looks no
more save upon Heaven, he weeps, he prays, and Eurydice opens her eyes
... Unhappy one, do not look at her! sing! sing! do not scare away the
butterfly of Psyche, which is about to alight on this flower! But the
insensate man has seen the look of the woman whom he has raised from
the dead, the Grand Hierophant gives place to the lover, his lyre falls
from his hands, he looks upon Eurydice, he darts towards her, .... he
clasps her in his arms, he finds her frozen still, her eyes are closed
again, her lips are paler and colder than ever, the sensitive soul has
trembled, the frail cord is broken anew --- and for ever. ... Eurydice
is dead, and the hymns of Orpheus can no longer recall her to life!
In our "Dogme et rituel de la haute magie," we had the temerity to say
that the resurrection of the dead is not an impossible phenomenon even
on the physical plane; and in saying that, we have not denied or in any
way contradicted the fatal law of death. A death which can discontinue
is only lethargy and slumber; but it is by lethargy and slumber that
{122} death always begins. The state of profound peace which succeeds
the agitations of life carries away the relaxed and sleeping soul; one
cannot make it return, and force it to plunge anew into life, except by
exciting violently all its affections and all its desires. When Jesus,
the Saviour of the world, was upon earth, the earth was more beautiful
and more desirable than Heaven; and yet it was necessary for Jesus to
cry aloud and apply a shock in order to awaken Jairuss daughter. It
was by dint of shudderings and tears that he called back his friend
Lazarus from the tomb, so difficult is it to interrupt a tired soul who
is sleeping his beauty-sleep!
At the same time, the countenance of death has not the same serenity
for every soul that contemplates it. When one has missed the goal of
life, when one carries away with one frenzied greeds or unassuaged
hates, eternity appears to the ignorant or guilty soul with such a
formidable proportion of sorrows, that it sometimes tries to fling
itself back into mortal life. How many souls, urged by the nightmare of
hell, have taken refuge in their frozen bodies, their bodies already
covered with funereal marble! Men have found skeletons turned over,
convulsed, twisted, and they have said, "Here are men who have been
buried alive." Often this was not the case. These may always be waifs
of death, men raised from the tomb, who, before they could abandon
themselves altogether to the anguish of the threshold of eternity, were
obliged to make a second attempt.
A celebrated magnetist, Baron Dupotet, teaches in his secret book on
"Magic" that one can kill by magic as by electricity. There is nothing
strange in this revelation for {123} anyone who is well acquainted with
the analogies of Nature. It is certain that in diluting beyond measure,
or in coagulating suddenly, the plastic medium of a subject, it is
possible to loose the body from the soul. It is sometimes sufficient to
arouse a violent anger, or an overmastering fear in anyone, to kill him
suddenly.
The habitual use of magnetism usually puts the subject who abandons
himself to it at the mercy of the magnetizer. When communication is
well-established, and the magnetizer can produce at will slumber,
insensibility, catalepsy, and so on, it will only require a little
further effort to bring on death.
We have been told as an actual fact a story whose au thenticity we will
not altogether guarantee.
We are about to repeat it because it may be true.
Certain persons who doubted both religion and magnetism, of that
incredulous class which is ready for all superstitions and all
fanaticisms, had persuaded a poor girl to submit to their experiments
for a fee. This girl was of an impressionable and nervous nature,
fatigued moreover by the excesses of a life which had been more than
irregular, while she was already disgusted with existence. They put her
to sleep; bade her see; she weeps and struggles. They speak to her of
God; she trembles in every limb.
   "No," said she, "no;" He frightens me; I will not look at Him."
   "Look at Him, I wish it."
   She opens her eyes, her pupils expand; she is terrifying.
   "What do you see?"
"I should not know how to say it. ... Oh for pitys sake awaken me!"
{124}
"No, look, and say what you see."
"I see a black night in which whirl sparks of every colour around two
great ever-rolling eyes. From these eyes leap rays whose spiral whorls
fill space. ... Ho, it hurts me! Wake me!"
   "No, look."
   "Where do you wish me to look now?"
   "Look into Paradise."
   "No, I cannot climb there; the great night pushes me back, I always
   fall back."
   "Very well then, look into hell."
   Here the sleep-waker became convulsively agitated.
   "No, no!" she cried sobbing; "I will not! I shall be giddy; I should
   fall! Oh, hold me back! Hold me back!"
   "No, descend."
   "Where do you want me to descend?"
   "Into hell."
   "But it is horrible! No! No! I will not go there!"
   "Go there."
   "Mercy!"
   "Go there. It is my will."
The features of the sleep-waker become terrible to behold; her hair
stands on end; her wide-opened eyes show only the white; her breast
heaves, and a sort of death-rattle escapes from her throat.
"Go there. It is my will," repeats the magnetizer.
"I am there!" says the unhappy girl between her teeth, falling back
exhausted. Then she no longer answers; her head hangs heavy on her
shoulder; her arms fall idly by her side. They approach her. They touch
her. They try to {125} waken her, but it is too late; the crime was
accomplished; the woman was dead. It was to the public incredulity in
the matter of magnetism that the authors of this sacrilegious
experiment owed their own immunity from prosecution. The authorities
held an inquest, and death was attri buted to the rupture of an
aneurism. The body, anyhow, bore no trace of violence; they had it
buried, and there was an end of the matter.
Here is another anecdote which we heard from a travelling companion.
Two friends were staying in the same inn, and sharing the same room.
One of them had a habit of talking in his sleep, and, at that time,
would answer the questions which his comrade put to him. One night, he
suddenly uttered stifled cries; his companion woke up and asked him
what was the matter.
"But, dont you see," said the sleeper, "dont you see that enormous
stone ... it is becoming loose from the mountain ... it is falling on
me, it is going to crush me."
   "Oh, well, get out of its way!"
   "Impossible! My feet are caught in brambles that cling ever closer.
   Ah! Help! Help! There is the great stone coming right upon me!"
   "Well, there it is!" said the other laughing, throwing the pillow at
   his head in order to wake him.
A terrible cry, suddenly strangled in his throat, a convulsion, a sigh,
then nothing more. The practical joker gets up, pulls his comrades
arm, calls him; in his turn, he becomes frightened, he cries out,
people come with lights ... the unfortunate sleep-waker was dead. {126}

CHAPTER III
MYSTERIES OF HALLUCINATIONS AND OF THE EVOCATION OF SPIRITS
AN hallucination is an illusion produced by an irregular movement of
the astral light.
It is, as we said previously, the admixture of the phenomena of sleep
with those of waking.
Our plastic medium breathes in and out the astral light or vital soul
of the earth, as our body breathes in and out the terrestrial
atmosphere. Now, just as in certain places the air is impure and not
fit for breathing, in the same way, certain unusual circumstances may
make the astral light unwholesome, and not assimilable.
The air of some places may be too bracing for some people, and suit
others perfectly; it is exactly the same with the magnetic light.
The plastic medium is like a metallic statue always in a state of
fusion. If the mould is defective, it becomes deformed; if the mould
breaks, it runs out.
The mould of the plastic medium is balanced and polarized vital force.
Our body, by means of the nervous system, attracts and retains this
fugitive form of light; but local fatigue, or partial over-excitement
of the apparatus, may occasion fluidic deformities.
These deformities partially falsify the mirror of the imagination, and
thus occasion habitual hallucinations to the static type of visionary.
The plastic medium, made in the image and likeness of our {127} body,
of which it figures every organ in light, has a sight, touch, hearing,
smell and taste which are proper to itself; it may, when it is
over-excited, communicate them by vibrations to the nervous apparatus
in such a manner that the hallucination is complete. The imagination
seems then to triumph over Nature itself, and produces truly strange
phenomena. The material body, deluged with fluid, seems to participate
in the fluidic qualities, it escapes from the operation of the laws of
gravity, becomes momentarily invulnerable, and even invisible, in a
circle of persons suffering from collective hallucination. The
convulsionaries of St. Medard, as one knows, had their flesh torn off
with red-hot pincers, had themselves felled like oxen, and ground like
corn, and crucified, without suffering any pain; they were levitated,
walked about head downwards, and ate bent pins and digested them.
We think we ought to recapitulate here the remarks which we published
in the "Estafette" on the prodigies produced by the American medium
Home, and on several phenomena of the same kind.
We have never personally witnessed Mr. Homes miracles, but our
information comes from the best sources; we gathered it in a house
where the American medium had been received with kindness when he was
in misfortune, and with indulgence when he reached the point of
thinking that his illness was a piece of good luck; in the house of a
lady born in Poland, but thrice French by the nobility of her heart,
the indescribable charm of her spirit, and the European celebrity of
her name.
The publication of this information in the "Estafette" attracted to us
at that time, without our particularly knowing {128} why, the insults
of a Mr. de Pene, since then become known to fame through his
unfortunate duel. We thought at the time of La Fontaines fable about
the fool who threw stones at the sage. Mr. de Pene spoke of us as an
unfrocked priest, and a bad Catholic. We at least showed ourself a good
Christian in pitying and forgiving him, and as it is impossible to be
an unfrocked priest without ever having been a priest, we let fall to
the ground an insult which did not reach us.

SPOOKS IN PARIS.
Mr. Home, a week ago, was once more about to quit Paris, that Paris
where even the angels and the demons, if they appeared in any shape,
would not pass very long for marvellous beings, and would find nothing
better to do than to return at top-speed to heaven or to hell, to
escape the forgetfulness and the neglect of human kind.
Mr. Home, his air sad and disillusioned, was then bidding farewell to a
noble lady whose kindly welcome had been one of the first happiness
which he had tasted in France. Mme. de B... treated him very kindly
that day, as always, and asked him to stay to dinner; the man of
mystery was about to accept, when, some one having just said that they
were waiting for a qabalist, well known in the world of occult science
by the publication of a book entitled "Dogme et rituel de la haute
magie," Mr. Home suddenly changed countenance, and said, stammering,
and with a visible embarrassment, that he could not remain, and that
the approach of this Professor of Magic caused him an incomparable
terror. Everything one could say to reassure him proved useless. "I do
not presume to judge the man," said he; "I do not {129} assert that he
is good or evil, I know nothing about it; but his atmosphere hurts me;
near him I should feel myself, as it were, without force, even without
life." After which explanation. Mr. Home hastened to salute and
withdraw.
This terror of miracle-mongers in the presence of the veritable
initiates of science, is not a new fact in the annals of occultism. You
may read in Philostratus the history of the Lamia who trembles on
hearing the approach of Apollonius of Tyana. Our admirable story-teller
Alexander Dumas dramatized this magical anecdote in the magnificent
epitome of all legends which forms the prologue to his great epic
novel, "The Wandering Jew."<
Eugene Sue. --- TRANS.>> The scene takes place at Corinth; it is an
old-time wedding with its beautiful children crowned with flowers,
bearing the nuptial torches, and singing gracious epithalamia flowered
with voluptuous images like the poems of Catullus. The bride is as
beautiful in her chaste draperies as the ancient Polyhumnia; she is
amorous and deliciously provoking in her modesty, like a Venus of
Correggio, or a Grace of Canova. The bridegroom is Clinias, a disciple
of the famous Apollonius of Tyana. The master had promised to come to
his disciples wedding, but he does not arrive, and the fair bride
breathes easier, for she fears Apollonius. However, the day is not
over. The hour has arrived when the newly married are to be conducted
to the nuptial couch. Meroe trembles, pales, looks obstinately towards
the door, stretches out her hand with alarm and says in a strangled
voice: "Here he is! It is he!" It was in fact Apollonius. Here is the
magus; here is the master; the hour of enchantments has passed;
jugglery falls before true {130} science. One seeks the lovely bride,
the white Meroe, and one sees no more than an old woman, the sorceress
Canidia, the devourer of little children. Clinias is disabused; he
thanks his master, he is saved.
The vulgar are always deceived about magic, and confuse adepts with
enchanters. True magic, that is to say, the traditional science of the
magi, is the mortal enemy of enchantment; it prevents, or makes to
cease, sham miracles, hostile to the light, that fascinate a small
number of prejudiced or credulous witnesses. The apparent disorder in
the laws of Nature is a lie: it is not then a miracle. The true
miracle, the true prodigy always flaming in the eyes of all, is the
ever constant harmony of effect and cause; these are the splendours of
eternal order!
We could not say whether Cagliostro would have performed miracles in
the presence of Swedenborg; but he would certainly have dreaded the
presence of Paracelsus and of Henry Khunrath, if these great men had
been his contemporaries.
Far be it from us, however, to denounce Mr. Home as a low-class
sorcerer, that is to say, as a charlatan. The celebrated American
medium is sweet and natural as a child. He is a poor and over-sensitive
being, without cunning and without defence; he is the plaything of a
terrible force of whose nature he is ignorant, and the first of his
dupes is certainly himself.
The study of the strange phenomena which are produced in the
neighbourhood of this young man is of the greatest importance. One must
seriously reconsider the too easy denials of the eighteenth century,
and open out before {131} science and reason broader horizons than
those of a bourgeois criticism, which denies everything which it does
not yet know how to explain to itself. Facts are inexorable, and
genuine good faith should never fear to examine them.
The explanation of these facts, which all traditions obstinately
affirm, and which are reproduced before our eyes with tiresome
publicity, this explanation, ancient as the facts themselves, rigorous
as mathematics, but drawn for the first time from the shadows in which
the hierophants of all ages have hidden it, would be a great scientific
event if it could obtain sufficient light and publicity. This event we
are perhaps about to prepare, for one would not permit us the audacious
hope of accomplishing it.
Here, in the first place, are the facts, in all their singularity. We
have verified them, and we have established them with a rigorous
exactitude, abstaining in the first place from all explanation and all
commentary.
Mr. Home is subject to trances which put him, according to his own
account, in direct communication with the soul of his mother, and,
through her, with the entire world of spirits. He describes, like the
sleep-wakers of Cahagnet, persons whom he has never seen, and who are
recognized by those who evoke them; he will tell you even their names,
and will reply, on their behalf, to questions which can be understood
only by the soul evoked and yourselves.
When he is in a room, inexplicable noises make themselves heard.
Violent blows resound upon the furniture, and in the walls; sometimes
doors and windows open by themselves, as if they were blown open by a
storm; one even hears the wind and the rain, though when one goes out
of doors, the sky {132} is cloudless, and one does not feel the
lightest breath of wind.
The furniture is overturned and displace, without anybody touching it.
Pencils write of their own accord. Their writing is that of Mr. Home,
and they make the same mistakes as he does.
Those present feel themselves touched and seized by invisible hands.
These contacts, which seem to select ladies, lack a serious side, and
sometimes even propriety. We think that we shall be sufficiently
understood.
Visible and tangible hands come out, or seem to come out, of tables;
but in this case, the tables must be covered. The invisible agent needs
certain apparatus, just as do the cleverest successors of Robert
Houdin.
These hands show themselves above all in darkness; they are warm and
phosphorescent, or cold and black. They write stupidities, or touch the
piano; and when they have touched the piano, it is necessary to send
for the tuner, their contact being always fatal to the exactitude of
the instrument.
One of the most considerable personages in England, Sir Bulwer Lytton,
has seen and touched those hands; we have read his written and signed
attestation. He declares even that he has seized them, and drawn them
towards himself with all his strength, in order to withdraw from their
incognito the arm to which they should naturally be attached. But the
invisible object has proved stronger than the English novelist, and the
hands have escaped him.
A Russian nobleman who was the protector of Mr. Home, and whose
character and good faith could not possibly be doubted, Count A.
B------, has also seen and seized with {133} vigor the mysterious
hands. "They are," says he, "perfect shapes of human hands, warm and

living, only one feels no bones." Pressed by an unavoidable constraint,
those hands did not struggle to escape, but grew smaller, and in some
way melted, so that the Count ended by no longer holding anything.
Other persons who have seen them, and touched them, say that the
fingers are puffed out and stiff, and compare them to gloves of
india-rubber, swollen with a warm and phosphorescent air. Sometimes,
instead of hands, it is feet which produce themselves, but never naked.
The spirit, which probably lacks footwear, respects (at least in this
particular) the delicacy of ladies, and never shows his feet but under
a drapery or a cloth.
The production of these feet very much tires and frightens Mr. Home. He
then endeavours to approach some healthy person, and seizes him like a
drowning man; the person so seized by the medium feels himself, on a
sudden, in a singular state of exhaustion and debility.
A Polish gentleman, who was present at one of the "seances" of Mr.
Home, had placed on the ground between his feet a pencil on a paper,
and had asked for a sign of the presence of the spirit. For some
instants nothing stirred, but suddenly, the pencil was thrown to the
other end of the room. The gentleman stooped, took the paper, and saw
there three qabalistic signs which nobody understood. Mr. Home (alone)
appeared, on seeing them, to be very much upset, and even frightened;
but he refused to explain himself as to the nature and significance of
these characters. The investigators accordingly kept them, and took
them to that Professor of High {134} Magic whose approach had been so
much dreaded by the medium. We have seen them, and here is a minute
description of them.
They were traced forcibly, and the pencil had almost cut the paper.
They had been dashed on to the paper without order or alignment.
The first was the symbol which the Egyptian initiates usually placed in
the hand of Typhon. A tau with upright double lines opened in the form
of a compass; an ankh (or crux ansata) having at the top a circular
ring; below the ring, a double horizontal line; beneath the double
horizontal line, two oblique lines, like a V upside down.
The second character represented a Grand Hierophants cross, with the
three hierarchical cross-bars. This symbol, which dates from the
remotest antiquity, is still the attri bute of our sovereign pontiffs,
and forms the upper extremity of their pastoral staff. But the sign
traced by the pencil had this particularity, that the upper branch, the
head of the cross, was double, and formed again the terrible Typhonian
V, the sign of antagonism and separation, the symbol of hate and
eternal combat.
The third character was that which Freemasons call the Philosophical
Cross, a cross with four equal arms, with a point in each of its
angles. But, instead of four points, there were only two, placed in the
two right-hand corners, once more a sign of struggle, separation and
denial.
The Professor, whom one will allow us to distinguish from the narrator,
and to name in the third person in order not to weary our readers in
having the air of speaking of {135} ourself --- the Professor, then,
Master Eliphas Levi, gave the persons assembled in Mme. de B------s
drawing-room the scientific explanation of the three signatures, and

this is what he said:
"These three signs belong to the series of sacred and primitive
hieroglyphs, known only to initiates of the first order. The first is
the signature of Typhon. It expresses the blasphemy of the evil spirit
by establishing dualism in the creative principle. For the crux ansata
of Osiris is a lingam upside down, and represents the paternal and
active force of God (the vertical line extending from the circle)
fertilizing passive nature (the horizontal line). To double the
vertical line is to affirm that nature has two fathers; it is to put
adultery in the place of the divine motherhood, it is to affirm,
instead of the principle of intelligence, blind fatality, which has for
result the eternal conflict of appearances in nothingness; it is, then,
the most ancient, the most au thentic, and the most terrible of all the
stigmata of hell. It signifies the "atheistic god"; it is the signature
of Satan.
"This first signature is hieratical, and bears reference to the occult
characters of the divine world.
"The second pertains to philosophical hieroglyphs, it represents the
graduated extent of idea, and the progressive extension of form.
"It is a triple tau upside down; it is human thought affirming the
absolute in the three worlds, and that absolute ends here by a fork,
that is to say, by the sign of doubt and antagonism. So that, if the
first character means: There is no God, the rigorous signification of
this one is: Hierarchical truth does not exist. {136}
"The third or philosophical cross has been in all initiations the
symbol of Nature, and its four elementary forms. The four points
represent the four indicible an incommunicable letters of the occult
tetragram, that eternal formula of the Great Arcanum, G.. A..
"The two points on the right represent force, as those on the left
symbolize love, and the four letters should be read from right to left,
beginning by the right-hand upper corner, and going thence to the
left-hand lower corner, and so for the others, making the cross of St.
Andrew.
"The suppression of the two left-hand points expresses the negation of
the cross, the negation of mercy and of love.
"The affirmation of the absolute reign of force, and its eternal
antagonism, from above to beneath, and from beneath to above.
   "The glorification of tyranny and of revolt.
   "The hieroglyphic sign of the unclean rite, with which, rightly or
   wrongly, the Templars were reproached; it is the sign of disorder
   and of eternal despair."
Such, then, are the first revelations of the hidden science of the magi
with regard to these phenomena of supernatural manifestations. Now let
it be permitted to us to compare with these strange signatures other
contemporary apparitions of phenomenal writings, for it is really a
brief which science ought to study before taking it to the tribunal of
public opinion. One must then despise no research, overlook no clue.
In the neighbourhood of Caen, at Tilly-sur-Seulles, a series of
inexplicable facts occurred some years ago, under the influence of a
medium, or ecstatic, named Eugene Vintras. {137}
Certain ridiculous circumstances and a prosecution for swindling soon
caused this thaumaturgist to fall into oblivion, and even into
contempt; he had, moreover, been attacked with violence in pamphlets
whose authors had at one time been admirers of his doctrine, for the
medium Vintras took it upon himself to dogmatize. One thing, however,
is remarkable in the invectives of which he is the object: his
adversaries, though straining every effort in order to scourge him,
recognize the truth of his miracles, and content themselves with
attri buting them to the devil.
What, then, are these so au thentic miracles of Vintras? On this subject
we are better informed than anybody, as will soon appear. Affidavits
signed by honourable witnesses, persons who are artists, doctors,
priests, all men above reproach, have been communicated to us; we have
questioned eye-witnesses, and, better than that, we have seen with our
own eyes. The facts deserve to be described in detail.
There is in Paris a writer named Mr. Madrolle, who is, to say the least
of it, a bit eccentric. He is an old man of good family. He wrote at
first on behalf of Catholicism in the most exalted way, received most
flattering encouragements from ecclesiastical authority, and even
letters from the Holy See. Then he saw Vintras; and, led away by the
prestige of his miracles, became a determined sectarian, and an
irreconcilable enemy of the hierarchy and of the clergy.
At the period when Eliphas Levi was publishing his "Dogme et rituel de
la haute magie," he received a pamphlet from Mr. Madrolle which
astonished him. In it, the author vigorously sustained the most unheard
of paradoxes in the disordered style of the ecstatics. For him, life
sufficed for {138} the expiation of the greatest crimes, since it was
the consequence of a sentence of death. The most wicked men, being the
most unhappy of all, seemed to him to offer the sublimest of expiations
to God. He broke all bounds in his attack on all repression and all
damnation. "A religion which damns," he cried, "is a damned religion!"
He further preached the most absolute licence under the pretext of
charity, and so far forgot himself as to say, that "the most imperfect
and the most apparently reprehensible act of love was worth more than
the best of prayers."<
Problem, IX, p. 52. --- O. M. It is difficult to determine whether the
words act of love should be interpreted in their gross, or in their
mystical, sense. Perhaps Madrolle was himself intentionally ambiguous.
--- TRANS.>> It was the Marquis de Sade turned preacher!<
Marquis de Sade was, above all, a preacher. Three-fourths of "Justine"

are verbose arguments in favour of so-called vice. Again Levi trips in
referring to an author whom he has not read. --- TRANS.>> Further, he
denied the existence of the devil with an enthusiasm often full of
eloquence.
"Can you conceive," said he, "a devil tolerated and authorized by God?
Can you conceive, further, a God who made the devil, and who allowed
him to ravage creatures already so weak, and so prompt to deceive
themselves! A god of the devil, in short, abetted, protected, and
scarcely surpassed in his revenges, by a devil of a god!" The rest of
the pamphlet was of the same vigour. The Professor of Magic was almost
frightened, and inquired the address of Mr. Madrolle. It was not
without some trouble that he obtained an interview with this singular
pamphleteer, and here is, more or less, their conversation:
ELIPHAS LEVI. "Sir, I have received a pamphlet from you. {139} I am
come to thank you for your gift, and, at the same time, to testify to
my astonishment and disappointment."
MR. MADROLLE. "Your disappointment, sir! Pray explain yourself, I do
not understand you."
"It is a lively regret to me, sir, to see you make mistakes which I
have myself at one time made. But I had then, at least, the excuse of
inexperience and youth. Your pamphlet lacks conviction, because it
lacks discrimination. Your intention was doubtless to protest against
errors in belief, and abuses in morality: and behold, it is the belief
and the morality themselves that you attack! The exaltation which
overflows in your pamphlet may indeed do you the greatest harm, and
some of your best friends must have experienced anxiety with regard to
the state of your health. ..."
"Oh, no doubt; they have said, and say still, that I am mad. But it is
nothing new that believers must undergo the folly of the cross. I am
exalted, sir, because you yourself would be so in my place, because it
is impossible to remain calm in the presence of prodigies. ..."
"Oh, oh, you speak of prodigies, that interests me. Come, between
ourselves, and in all good faith, of what prodigies are you speaking?"
"Eh, what prodigies should they be but those of the great prophet
Elias, returned to earth under the name of Pierre Michel?"
"I understand; you mean Eugene Vintras. I have heard his prophecies
spoken of. But does he really perform miracles?"
["Here Mr. Madrolle jumps in his chair, raises his eyes and his hands
to heaven, and finally smiles with a condescension which seems to sound
the depths of pity."] {140}
   "Does he do miracles, sir?
   "But the greatest!
   "The most astonishing!
   "The most incontestable!
"The truest miracles that have ever been done on earth since the time
of Jesus Christ! ... What! Thousands of hosts appear on altars where
there were none; wine appears in empty chalices, and it is not an
illusion, it is wine, a delicious wine ....celestial music is heard,
perfumes of the world beyond fill the room, and then blood .... real
human blood (doctors have examined it!), real blood, I tell you, sweats
and sometimes flows from the hosts, imprinting mysterious characters on
the altars! I am talking to you of what I have seen, of what I have
heard, of what I have touched, of what I have tasted! And you want me
to remain cold at the bidding of an ecclesiastical authority which
finds it more convenient to deny everything than to examine the least
thing!..."
"By permission, sir; it is in religious matters, above all, that
authority can never by wrong. ... In religion, good is hierarchy, and
evil is anarchy; to what would the influence of the priesthood be
reduced, in effect, if you set up the principle that one must rather
believe the testimony of ones senses than the decision of the Church?
Is not the Church more visible than all your miracles? Those who see
miracles and who do not see the Church are much more to be pitied than
the blind, for there remains to them not even the resource of allowing
themselves to be led. ..."
"Sir, I know all that as well as you do. But God cannot be divided
against Himself. He cannot allow good faith to be deceived, and the
Church itself could hardly decide that {141} I am blind when I have
eyes. ... Here, see what John Huss says in his letter, the forty-third
letter, towards the end:
"A doctor of theology said to me: "In everything I should submit
myself to the Council; everything would then be good and lawful for
me." He added: "If the Council said that you had only one eye, although
you have two, it would be still necessary to admit that the Council was
not wrong." "Were the whole world," I replied, "to affirm such a thing,
so long as I had the use of my reason, I should not be able to agree
without wounding my conscience." I will say to you, like John Huss,
Before there were a Church and its councils there were truth and
reason."
"Pardon me if I interrupt, my dear sir; you were a Catholic at one
time, you are no longer so; consciences are free. I shall merely submit
to you that the institution of the hierarchical infallibility in
matters of dogma is reasonable in quite another sense, and far more
incontestably true than all the miracles of the world. Besides, what
sacrifices ought one not to make in order to preserve peace! Believe
me, John Huss would have been a greater man if he had sacrificed one of
his eyes to universal concord, rather than deluge Europe with blood! O
sir! let the Church decide when she will that I have but one eye; I
only ask her one favour, it is to tell me in which eye I am blind, in
order that I may close it and look with the other with an
irreproachable orthodoxy!"
"I admit that I am not orthodox in your fashion."
"I perceive that clearly. But let us come to the miracles! You have
then seen, touched, felt, tasted them; but, come, putting exaltation on
one side, please give me a thoroughly detailed and circumstantial
account of the affair, and, above {142} all, evident proof of miracle.
Am I indiscreet in asking you that?"
"Not the least in the world; but which shall I choose? There are so
many!"
"Let me think," added Mr. Madrolle, after a moments reflection and
with a slight trembling in the voice, "the prophet is in London, and we
are here. Eh! well, if you only make a mental request to the prophet to
send you immediately the communion, and if in a place designated by
you, in your own house, in a cloth, or in a book, you found a host on
your return, what would you say?"
"I should declare the fact inexplicable by ordinary critical rules."
"Oh, well, sir," cried Mr. Madrolle, triumphantly, "there is a thing
that often happens to me; whenever I wish, that is to say, whenever I
am prepared and hope humbly to be worthy of it! Yes, sir, I find the
host when I ask for it; I find it real and palpable, but often
ornamented with little hearts, little miraculous hearts, which one
might think had been painted by Raphael."
Eliphas Levi, who felt ill at ease in discussing facts with which there
was mingled a sort of profanation of the most holy things, then took
his leave of the one-time Catholic writer, and went out meditating on
the strange influence of this Vintras, who had so overthrown that old
belief, and turned the old savants head.
Some days afterwards, the qabalist Eliphas was awakened very early in
the morning by an unknown visitor. It was a man with white hair,
entirely clothed in black; his physiognomy {143} that of an extremely
devout priest; his whole air, in short, was entirely worthy of respect.
This ecclesiastic was furnished with a letter of recommendation
conceived in these terms:
"DEAR MASTER,
"This is to introduce to you an old savant, who wants to gabble Hebrew
sorcery with you. Receive him like myself --- I mean as I myself
received him --- by getting rid of him in the best way you can.
   "Entirely yours, in the sacrosanct Qabalah,
   "AD. DESBARROLLES."
"Reverend sir," said Eliphas, smiling, after having read the letter. "I
am entirely at your service, and can refuse nothing to the friend who
writes to me. You have then seen my excellent disciple Desbarrolles?"
"Yes, sir, and I have found in him a very amiable and very learned man.
I think both you and him worthy of the truth which has been lately
revealed by astonishing miracles, and the positive revelations of the
Archangel St. Michael."
"Sir, you do us honour. Has then the good Desbarrolles astonished you
by his science?"
"Oh, certainly he possesses in a very remarkable degree the secrets of
cheiromancy; by merely inspecting my hand, he told me nearly the whole
history of my life."
"He is quite capable of that. But did he enter into the smallest
details?"
"Sufficiently, sir, to convince me of his extraordinary power."
"Did he tell you that you were once the vicar of {144} Mont-Louis, in
the diocese of Tours? That you are the most zealous disciple of the
ecstatic Eugene Vintras? And that your name is Charvoz?"
It was a veritable thunderbolt; at each of these three phrases the old
priest jumped in his chair. When he heard his name, he turned pale, and
rose as if a spring had been released.
"You are then really a magician?" he cried; "Charvoz is certainly my
name, but it is not that which I bear; I call myself La Paraz."
"I know it; La Paraz is the name of your mother. You have left a
sufficiently enviable position, that of a country vicar, and your
charming vicarage, in order to share the troubled existence of a
sectary."
   "Say of a great prophet!"
   "Sir, I believe perfectly in your good faith. But you will permit me
   to examine a little the mission and the character of your prophet."
   "Yes, sir; examination, full light, the microscope of science, that
   is all we ask. Come to London, sir, and you will see! The miracles
   are permanently established there."
   "Would you be so kind, sir, as to give me, first of all, some exact
   and conscientious details with regard to the miracles?"
   "Oh, as many as you like!"
And immediately the old priest began to recount things which the whole
world would have found impossible, but which did not even turn a
eye-lash of the Professor of Transcendental Magic. {145}
Here is one of his stories:
One day Vintras, in an access of enthusiasm, was preaching before his
heterodox altar; twenty-five persons were present. An empty chalice was
upon the altar, a chalice well known to the Abbe Charvoz; he brought it
himself from his church of Mont-Louis, and he was perfectly certain
that the sacred vase had neither secret ducts nor double bottom.
"In order to prove to you, said Vintras, that it is God Himself who
inspires me, He acquaints me that this chalice will fill itself with
drops of His blood, under the appearance of wine, and you will all be
able to taste the fruit of the vines of the future, the wine which we
shall drink with the Saviour in the Kingdom of His Father...
"Overcome with astonishment and fear," continued the Abbe Charvoz, "I
go up to the altar, I take the chalice, I look at the bottom of it: it
was entirely empty. I overturned it in the sight of everyone, then I
returned to kneel at the foot of the altar, holding the chalice between
my two hands... Suddenly there was a slight noise; the noise of a drop
of water, falling into the chalice from the ceiling, was distinctly
heard, and a drop of wine appeared at the bottom of the vase.
"Every eye was fixed on me. Then they looked at the ceiling, for our
simple chapel was held in a poor room; in the ceiling was neither hole
nor fissure; nothing was seen to fall, and yet the noise of the fall of
the drops multiplied, it became more rapid, and more frequent, .. and
the wine climbed from the bottom of the chalice towards the brim.
"When the chalice was full, I bore it slowly around so that all might
see it; then the prophet dipped his lips into it, and all, one after
the other, tasted the miraculous wine. It is in {146} vain to search
memory for any delicious taste which would gave an idea of it... And
what shall I tell you," added the Abbe Charvoz, "of those miracles of
blood which astonish us every day? Thousands of wounded and bleeding
hosts are found upon our altars. The sacred stigmata appear to all who
wish to see them. The hosts, at first white, slowly become marked with
characters and hearts in blood. ... Must one believe that God abandons
the holiest objects to the false miracles of the devil? Should not one
rather adore, and believe that the hour of the supreme and final
revelation has arrived?"
Abbe Charvoz, as he thus spoke, had in his voice that sort of nervous
trembling that Eliphas Levi had already noticed in the case of Mr.
Madrolle. The magician shook his head pensively; then, suddenly:
"Sir," said he to the Abbe; "you have upon you one or two of these
miraculous hosts. Be good enough to show them to me."
   "Sir------"
   "You have some, I know it; why should you deny it?"

   "I do not deny it," said Abbe Charvoz; "but you will permit me not
   to expose to the investigations of incredulity objects of the most
   sincere and devout belief."
"Reverend sir," said Eliphas gravely; "incredulity is the mistrust of
an ignorance almost sure to deceive itself. Science is not incredulous.
I believe, to begin with, in you own conviction, since you have
accepted a life of privation and even of reproach, in order to stick to
this unhappy belief. Show me then your miraculous hosts, and believe
entirely in my respect for the objects of a sincere worship." {147}
"Oh, well!" said the Abbe Charvoz, after another slight hesitation; "I
will show them to you."
Then he un buttoned the top of his black waistcoat and drew forth a
little reliquary of silver, before which he fell on his knees, with
tears in his eyes, and prayers on his lips; Eliphas fell on his knees
beside him, and the Abbe opened the reliquary.
There were in the reliquary three hosts, one whole, the two others
almost like paste, and as it were kneaded with blood.
The whole host bore in its centre a heart in relief on both sides; a
clot of blood moulded in the form of a heart, which seemed to have been
formed in the host itself in an inexplicable manner. The blood could
not have been applied from without, for the imbibed colouring matter
had left the particles adhering to the exterior surface quite white.
The appearance of the phenomenon was the same on both sides. The Master
of Magic was seized with an involuntary trembling.
This emotion did not escape the old vicar, who having once again done
adoration and closed his reliquary, drew from his pocket an album, and
gave it without a word to Eliphas. ... There were copies of all the
bleeding characters which had been observed upon hosts since the
beginning of the ecstasies and miracles of Vintras.
There were hearts of every kind, and many different sorts of emblems.
But three especially excited the curiosity of Eliphas to the highest
point.
"Reverend sir," said he to Charvoz, "do you know these three signs?"
"No," replied the Abbe ingenuously; "but the prophet assures us that
they are of the highest importance, and that {148} their hidden
signification shall soon be made known, that is to say, at the end of
the Age."
"Oh, well, sir," solemnly replied the Professor of Magic; "even before
the end of the Age, I will explain them to you; these three qabalistic
signs are the signature of the devil!"
   "It is impossible!" cried the old priest.
   "It is the case," replied Eliphas, with determination.
Now, the signs were these:
1 Degree. --- The star of the micrososm, or the magic pentagram. It is
the five-pointed star of occult masonry, the star with which Agrippa
drew the human figure, the head in the upper point, the four limbs in
the four others. The flaming star, which, when turned upside down, is
the hierolgyphic sign of the goat of Black Magic, whose head may then
be drawn in the star, the two horns at the top, the ears to the right
and left, the beard at the bottom. It is the sign of antagonism and
fatality. It is the goat of lust attacking the heavens with its horns.
It is a sign execrated by initiates of a superior rank, even at the
Sabbath.<
down? --- O. M.>>
2 Degree. --- The two hermetic serpents. But the heads and tails,
instead of coming together in two similar semicircles, were turned
outwards, and there was no intermediate line representing the caduceus.
Above the head of the serpents, one saw the fatal V, the Typhonian
fork, the character of hell. To the right and left, the sacred numbers
III and VII were relegated to the horizontal line which represents
passive and secondary things. The meaning of the character was then
this:
Antagonism is eternal. {149}
God is the strife of fatal forces, which always create through
destruction.
The things of religion are passive and transitory.
Boldness makes use of them, war profits by them, and it is by them that
discord is perpetuated.
3 Degree. --- Finally, the qabalistic monogram of Jehovah, the JOD and
the HE, but upside down. This is, according to the doctors of occult
science, the most frightful of all blasphemies, and signifies, however
one may read it, "Fatality alone exists: God and the Spirit are not.
Matter is all, and spirit is only a fiction of this matter demented.
Form is more than idea, woman more than man, pleasure more than
thought, vice more than virtue, the mob more than its chiefs, the
children more than their fathers, folly more than reason!"
There is what was written in characters of blood upon the pretended
miraculous hosts of Vintras!
We affirm upon our honour that the facts cited above are such as we
have stated, and that we ourselves saw and explained the characters
according to magical science and the true keys of the Qabalah.
The disciple of Vintras also communicated to us the description and
design of the pontifical vestments given, said he, by Jesus Christ
Himself to the pretended prophet, during one of his ecstatic trances.
Vintras had these vestments made, and clothes himself with them in
order to perform his miracles. They are red in colour. He wears upon
his forehead a cross in the form of a lingam; and his pastoral staff is
surmounted by a hand, all of whose fingers are closed, except the thumb
and the little finger.
Now, all that is diabolical in the highest degree. And is {150} it not
a really wonderful thing, this intuition of the signs of a lost
science? For it is transcendental magic which, basing the universe upon
the two columns of Hermes and of Solomon, has divided the metaphysical
world into two intellectual zones, one white and luminous, enclosing
positive ideas, the other black and obscure, containing negative ideas,
and which has given to the synthesis of the first, the name of God, and
to that of the other, the name of the devil or of Satan.
The sign of the lingam borne upon the forehead is in India the
distinguishing mark of the worshippers of Shiva the destroyer; for that
sign being that of the great magical arcanum, which refers to the
mystery of universal generation, to bear it on the forehead is to make
profession of dogmatic shamelessness. "Now," say the Orientals, "the
day when there is no longer modesty in the world, the world, given over
to debauch which is sterile, will end at once for lack of mothers.
Modesty is the acceptance of maternity."
The hand with the three large fingers closed expresses the negation of
the ternary, and the affirmation of the natural forces alone.
The ancient hierophants, as our learned and witty friend Desbarolles is
about to explain in an admirable book which is at present in the press,
had given a complete "resume" of magical science in the human hand. The
forefinger, for them, represented Jupiter; the middle finger, Saturn;
the ring-finger, Apollo or the Sun. Among the Egyptians, the middle
finger was Ops, the forefinger Osiris, and the little finger Horus; the
thumb represented the generative force, and the little finger, cunning.
A hand, showing only the thumb and {151} the little finger, is
equivalent, in the sacred hieroglyphic language, to the exclusive
affirmation of passion and diplomacy. It is the perverted and material
translation of that great word of St. Augustine: "Love, and do what you
will!" Compare now this sign with the doctrine of Mr. Madrolle: "The
most imperfect and the most apparently guilty act of love is worth more
than the best of prayers." And you will ask yourself what is that force
which, independently of the will, and of the greater or less knowledge
of man (for Vintras is a man of no education), formulates its dogmas
with signs buried in the rubbish of the ancient world, re-discovers the
mysteries of Thebes and of Eleusis, and writes for us the most learned
reveries of India with the occult alphabets of Hermes?
What is that force? I will tell you. But I have still plenty of other
miracles to tell; and this article is like a judicial investigation. We
must, before anything else, complete it.
However, we may be permitted, before proceeding to other accounts to
transcribe here a page from a German "illumine," of the work of Ludwig
Tieck:
"If, for example, as an ancient tradition informs us, some of the
angels whom God had created fell all too soon, and if these, as they
also say, were precisely the most brilliant of the angels, one may very
well understand by this fall that they sought a new road, a new form
of activity, other occupations, and another life than those orthodox or
more passive spirits who remained in the realm assigned to them, and
made no use of liberty, the appanage of all of them. Their fall was
that weight of form which we now-a-days call reality, and which is a
protest on the part of individual existence against {152} its
reabsorption into the abysses of universal spirit. It is thus that
death preserves and reproduces life, it is thus that life is betrothed
to death. ... Do you understand now what Lucifer is? "Is it not the
very genius of ancient Prometheus," that force which sets in motion the
world, life, even movement, and which regulates the course of
successive forms? This force, by its resistance, equilibrated the
creative principle. It is thus that the Elohim gave birth to the earth.
When, subsequently, men were placed upon the earth by the Lord, as
intermediate spirits, in their enthusiasm, which led them to search
Nature in its depths, they gave themselves over to the influence of
that proud and powerful genius, and when they were softly ravished away
over the precipice of death to find life, there it was that they began
to exist in a real and natural manner, as is fit for all creatures."
This page needs no commentary, and explains sufficiently the tendencies
of what one calls spiritualism, or "spiritism."
It is already a long time since this doctrine, or, rather, this
antidoctrine, began to work upon the world, to plunge it into universal
anarchy. But the law of equilibrium will save us, and already the great
movement of reaction has begun.
We continue the recital of the phenomena.
One day a workman paid a visit to Eliphas Levi. He was a tall man of
some fifty years old, of frank appearance, and speaking in a very
reasonable manner. Questioned as to the motive of his visit, he
replied: "You ought to know it well enough; I am come to beg and pray
you to return to me what I have lost."
We must say, to be frank, that Eliphas knew nothing of {153} this
visitor, nor of what he might have lost. He accordingly replied: "You
think me much more of a sorcerer than I am; I do not know who you are,
nor what you seek; consequently, if you think that I can be useful to
you in any way, you must explain yourself and make your request more
precise."
"Oh, well, since you are determined not to understand me, you will at
least recognize this," said the stranger, taking from his pocket a
little, much-used black book.
   It was the "grimoire" of Pope Honorius.
   One word upon this little book so much decried.
The "grimoire" of Honorius is composed of an apocryphal constitution of
Honorius II, for the evocation and control of spirits; then of some
superstitious receipts ... it was the manual of the bad priests who
practised Black Magic during the darkest periods of the middle ages.
You will find there bloody rites, mingled with profanations of the Mass
and of the consecrated elements, formulae of bewitchment and malevolent
spells, and practices which stupidity alone could credit or knavery
counsel. In fact, it is a book complete of its kind; it is consequently
become very rare, and the bibliophile pushes it to very high prices in
the public sales.
"My dear sir," said the workman, sighing, "since I was ten years old, I
have not missed once performing the orison. This book never leaves me,
and I comply rigorously with all the prescribed ceremonies. Why, then,
have those who used to visit me abandoned me? Eli, Eli, lama ------"
"Stop," said Eliphas, "do not parody the most formidable words that

agony ever uttered in this world! Who are the beings who visited you by
virtue of this horrible book? Do {154} you know them? Have you promised
them anything? Have you signed a pact?"
"No," interrupted the owner of the "grimoire;" "I do not know them, and
I have entered into no agreement with them. I only know that among them
the chiefs are good, the intermediate rank partly good and partly evil;
the inferiors bad, but blindly, and without its being possible for them
to do better. He whom I evoked, and who has often appeared to me,
belongs to the most elevated hierarchy; for he was good-looking, well
dressed, and always gave me favourable answers. But I have lost a page
of my "grimoire," the first, the most important, that which bore the
autograph of the spirit; and, since then, he no longer appears when I
call him.
"I am a lost man. I am naked as Job, I have no longer either force or
courage. O Master, I conjure you, you who need only say one word, make
one sign, and the spirits will obey, take pity upon me, and restore to
me what I have lost!"
   "Give me your grimoire!" said Eliphas. "What name used you to give
   to the spirit who appeared to you?"
   "I called him Adonai."
   "And in what language was his signature?"
   "I do not know, but I suppose it was in Hebrew."
"There," said the Professor of Transcendental Magic, after having
traced two words in the Hebrew language in the beginning and at the end
of the book. "Here are two words which the spirits of darkness will
never counterfeit. Go in peace, sleep well, and no longer evoke
spirits."
   The workman withdrew.
   A week later, he returned to seek the Man of Science. {155}
"You have restored to me hope and life," said he; "my strength is
partially returned, I am able with the signatures that you gave me to
relieve sufferers, and cast out devils, but "him," I cannot see him
again, and, until I have seen him, I shall be sad to the day of my
death. Formerly, he was always near me, he sometimes touched me, and he
used to wake me up in the night to tell me all that I needed to know.
Master, I beg of you, let me see him again!"
   "See whom?"
   "Adonai,"
   "Do you know who Adonai is?"
   "No, but I want to see him again."
   "Adonai is invisible."
   "I have seen him."
   "He has no form."
   "I have touched him."
   "He is infinite."
   "He is very nearly of my own height."
   "The prophets say of him that the hem of his vestment, from the East
   to the West, sweeps the stars of the morning."
   "He had a very clean surcoat, and very white linen."
   "The Holy Scripture says that one cannot see him and live."
   "He had a kind and jovial face."
   "But how did you proceed in order to obtain these apparitions?"
   "Why, I did everything that it tells you to do in the "grimoire." "
   "What! Even the bloody sacrifice?"
   "Doubtless." {156}
   "Unhappy man! But who, then, was the victim?"
   At this question, the workman had a slight trembling; he paled, and
   his glance became troubled.
"Master, you know better than I what it is," said he humbly in a low
voice. "Oh, it cost me a great deal to do it; above all, the first
time, with a single blow of the magic knife to cut the throat of that
innocent creature! One night I had just accomplished the funereal
rites, I was seated in the circle on the interior threshold of my door,
and the victim had just been consumed in a great fire of alder and
cypress wood. ... All of a sudden, quite close to me .... I dreamt or
rather I felt it pass ... I heard in my ear a heartrending wail ... one
would have said that it wept; and since that moment, I think that I am
hearing it always."
Eliphas had risen; he looked fixedly upon his interlocutor. Had he
before him a dangerous madman, capable of renewing the atrocities of
the seigneur of Retz? And yet the face of the man was gentle and
honest. No, it was not possible.
"But then this victim. .. tell me clearly what it was. You suppose that
I know already. Perhaps I do know, but I have reasons for wishing you
to tell me."
"It was, according to the magic ritual, a young goat of a year old,
virgin, and without defect."
"A real young he-goat?"
"Doubtless. Understand that it was neither a childs toy, nor a stuffed
animal."
Eliphas breathed again.
"Good," thought he; "this man is not a sorcerer worthy of the stake. He
does not know that the abominable authors {157} of the "grimoire," when
they spoke of the virgin he-goat, meant a little child."
"Well," said he to his consultant; "give me some details about your
visions. What you tell me interests me in the highest degree."
The sorcerer --- for one must call him so --- the sorcerer then told
him of a series of strange facts, of which two families had been

witness, and these facts were precisely identical with the phenomena of
Mr.Home: hands coming out of walls, movements of furniture,
phosphorescent apparitions. One day, the rash apprentice-magician had
dared to call up Astaroth, and had seen the apparition of a gigantic
monster having the body of a hog, and the head borrowed from the
skeleton of a colossal ox. But he told all that with an accent of
truth, a certainty of having seen, which excluded every kind of doubt
as to the good faith and the entire conviction of the narrator.
Eliphas, who is an epicure in magic, was delighted with this find. In
the nineteenth century, a real sorcerer of the middle ages, a
remarkably innocent and convinced sorcerer, a sorcerer who had seen
Satan under the name of Adonai, Satan dressed like a respectable
citizen, and Astaroth in his true diabolical form! What a supreme find
for a museum! What a treasure for an archaeologist!
"My friend," said he to his new disciple, "I am going to help you to
find what you say you have lost. Take my book, observe the
prescriptions of the ritual, and come again to see me in a week."
A week later he returned, but this time the workman declared that he
had invented a life-saving machine of the greatest importance for the
navy. The machine is perfectly {158} put together; it only lacks one
thing --- it will not work: there is a hidden defect in the machinery.
What was that defect? The evil spirit alone could tell him. It is then
absolutely necessary to evoke him! ...
"Take care you do not!" said Eliphas. "You had much better say for nine
days this qabalistic evocation." He gave him a leaf covered with
manuscript. "Begin this evening, and return to-morrow to tell me what
you have seen, for to night you will have a manifestation."
The next day, our good man did not miss the appointment.
"I woke up suddenly," said he, "upon one oclock in the morning. In
front of my bed I saw a bright light, and in this light a "shadowy arm"
which passed and repassed before me, as if to magnetize me. Then I went
to sleep again, and some instants afterwards, waking anew, I saw again
the same light, but it had changed its place. It had passed from left
to right, and upon a luminous background I distinguished the silhouette
of a man who was looking at me with arms crossed."
   "What was this man like?"
   "Just about your height and breadth."
   "It is well. Go, and continue to do what I told you."
   The nine days rolled by; at the end of that time, a new visit; but
   this time he was absolutely radiant and excited. As soon as he
   caught sight of Eliphas:
"Thanks, Master!" he cried. "The machine works! People whom I did not
know have come to place at my disposal the funds which were necessary
to carry out my enterprise; I have found again peace in sleep; and all
that thanks to your power!" {159}
"Say, rather, thanks to your faith and your docility. And now,
farewell: I must work. .. Well, why do you assume this suppliant air,
and what more do you want of me?"
   "Oh, if you only would ------"
   "Well, what now? Have you not obtained all that you asked for, and

   even more than you asked for, for you did not mention money to me?"
   "Yes, doubtless," said the other sighing; "but I do want to see him
   again!"
   "Incorrigible!" said Eliphas.
Some days afterwards, the Professor of Transcendental Magic was
awakened, about two oclock in the morning, by an acute pain in the
head. For some moments he feared a cerebral congestion. He therefore
rose, relit his lamp, opened his window, walked to and fro in his
study, and then, calmed by the fresh air of the morning, he lay down
again, and slept deeply. He had a nightmare: he saw, terribly real, the
giant with the fleshless oxs head of which the workman had spoken to
him. The monster pursued him, and struggled with him. When he woke up,
it was already day, and somebody was knocking at his door. Eliphas
rose, threw on a dressing- gown, and opened; it was the workman.
"Master," said he, entering hastily, and with an alarmed air; "how are
you?"
"Very well," replied Eliphas.
"But last night, at two oclock in the morning, did you not run a great
danger?"
Eliphas did not grasp the allusion; he already no longer remembered the
indisposition of the night. {160}
   "A danger?" said he. "No; none that I know of."
   "Have you not been assaulted by a monster phantom, who sought to
   strangle you? Did it not hurt you?"
   Eliphas remembered.
   "Yes," said he, "certainly, I had the beginning of a sort of
   apoplectic attack, and a horrible dream. But how do you know that?"
"At the same time, an invisible hand struck me roughly on the shoulder,
and awoke me suddenly. I dreamt then that I saw you fighting with
Astaroth. I jumped up, and a voice said in my ear: Arise and go to the
help of thy Master; he is in danger. I got up in a great hurry. But
where must I run? What danger threatened you? Was it at your own house,
or elsewhere? The voice said nothing about that. I decided to wait for
sunrise; and immediately day dawned, I ran, and here I am."
"Thanks, friend," said the magus, holding out his hand; "Astaroth is a
stupid joker; all that happened last night was a little blood to the
head. Now, I am perfectly well. Be assured, then, and return to your
work."
Strange as may be the facts which we have just related, there remains
for us to unveil a tragic drama much more extraordinary still.
It refers to the deed of blood which at the beginning of this year
plunged Paris and all Christendom into mourning and stupefaction; a
deed in which no one suspected that Black Magic had any part.
Here is what happened:
During the winter, at the beginning of last year, a bookseller informed
the author of the "Dogme et rituel de la" {161} "haute magie" that an
ecclesiastic was looking for his address, testifying the greatest
desire to see him. Eliphas Levi did not feel himself immediately
prepossessed with confidence towards the stranger, to the point of
exposing himself without precaution to his visits; he indicated the
house of a friend, where he was to be in the company of his faithful
disciple, Desbarrolles. At the hour and date appointed they went, in
fact, to the house of Mme. A------, and found that the ecclesiastic had
been waiting for them for some moments.

He was a young and slim man; he had an arched and pointed nose, with
dull blue eyes. His bony and projecting forehead was rather broad than
high, his head was dolichocephalic, his hair flat and short, parted on
one side, of a greyish blond with just a tinge of chestnut of a rather
curious and disagreeable shade. His mouth was sensual and quarrelsome;
his manners were affable, his voice soft, and his speech sometimes a
little embarrassed. Questioned by Eliphas Levi concerning the object of
his visit, he replied that he was on the look-out for the "grimoire" of
Honorius, and that he had come to learn from the Professor of Occult
Science how to obtain that little black book, now-a-days almost
impossible to find.
"I would gladly give a hundred francs for a copy of that grimoire,"
said he.
"The work in itself is valueless," said Eliphas. "It is a pretended
constitution of Honorius II, which you will find perhaps quoted by some
erudite collector of apocryphal constitutions; you can find it in the
library."
"I will do so, for I pass almost all my time in Paris in the public
libraries." {162}
"You are not occupied in the ministry in Paris?"
"No, not now; I was for some little while employed in the parish of St.
Germain-Auxerrois."
"And you now spend your time, I understand, in curious researches in
occult science."
"Not precisely, but I am seeking the realization of a thought. ... I
have something to do."
"I do not suppose that this something can be an operation of Black
Magic. You know as well as I do, reverend sir, that the Church has
always condemned, and still condemns, severely, everything which
relates to these forbidden practices."
A pale smile, imprinted with a sort of sarcastic irony, was all the
answer that the Abbe gave, and the conversation fell to the ground.
However, the cheiromancer Desbarrolles was attentively looking at the
hand of the priest; he perceived it, a quite natural explanation
followed, the Abbe offered graciously and of his own accord his hand to
the experimenter. Desbarrolles knit his brows, and appeared
embarrassed. The hand was damp and cold, the fingers smooth and
spatulated; the mount of Venus, or the part of the palm of the hand
which corresponds to the thumb, was of a noteworthy development, the
line of life was short and broken, there were crosses in the centre of
the hand, and stars upon the mount of the moon.
"Reverend sir," said Desbarrolles, "if you had not a very solid
religious education you would easily become a dangerous sectary, for
you are led on the one hand toward the most exalted mysticism, and on
the other to the most concentrated obstinacy combined with the greatest
secretiveness that can {163} possibly be. You want much, but you
imagine more, and as you confide your imaginations to nobody, they
might attain proportions which would make them veritable enemies for
yourself. Your habits are contemplative an rather easygoing, but it is
a somnolence whose awakenings are perhaps to be dreaded. You are
carried away by a passion which your state of life ------ But pardon,
reverend sir, I fear that I am over-stepping the boundaries of

discretion."
"Say everything, sir; I am willing to hear all, I wish to now
everything."
"Oh, well! If, as I do not doubt to be the case, you turn to the profit
of charity all the restless activities with which the passions of your
heart furnish you, you must often be blessed for your good works."
The Abbe once more smiled that dubious and fatal smile which gave so
singular an expression to his pallid countenance. He rose and took his
leave without having given his name, and without any one having thought
to ask him for it.
Eliphas and Desbarrolles reconducted him as far as the staircase, in
token of respect for his dignity as a priest.
Near the staircase he turned and said slowly:
"Before long, you will hear something. ... You will hear me spoken of,"
he added, emphasizing each word. Then he saluted with head and hand,
turned without adding a single word, and descended the staircase.
The two friends returned to Mme. A------s room.
"There is a singular personage," said Eliphas; "I think I have seen

Pierrot of the Funambules playing the part of a traitor. What he said
to us on his departure seemed to me very much like a threat." {164}
"You frightened him," said Mme. A------. "Before your arrival, he was
beginning to open his whole mind, but you spoke to him of conscience

and of the laws of the Church, and he no longer dared to tell you what
he wished."
   "Bah! What did he wish then?"
   "To see the devil."
   "Perhaps he thought I had him in my pocket?"
"No, but he knows that you give lessons in the Qabalah, and in magic,
and so he hoped that you would help him in his enterprise. He told my
daughter and myself that in his vicarage in the country, he had already
made one night an evocation of the devil by the help of a popular
"grimoire." Then said he, a whirlwind seemed to shake the vicarage;
the rafts groaned, the wainscoting cracked, the doors shook, the
windows opened with a crash, and whistlings were heard in every corner
of the house. He then expected that formidable vision to follow, but
he saw nothing; no monster presented itself; in a word, the devil would
not appear. That is why he is looking for the "grimoire" of Honorius,
for he hopes to find in it stronger conjurations, and more efficacious
rites."
   "Really! But the man is then a monster, or a madman!"
   "I think he is just simply in love," said Desbarrolles. "He is
   gnawed by some absurd passion, and hopes for absolutely nothing
   unless he can get the devil to interfere."
   "But how then --- what does he mean when he says that we shall hear
   him spoken of?"
   "Who knows? Perhaps he thinks to carry off the Queen of England, or
   the Sultana Valide."
The conversation dropped, and a whole year passed {165} without Mme.
A------. or Desbarrolles, or Eliphas hearing the unknown young priest
spoken of.

In the course of the night between the 1^st and 2^nd of January, 1857,
Eliphas Levi was awakened suddenly by the emotions of a bizarre and
dismal dream. It seemed to him that he was in a dilapidated room of
gothic architecture, rather like the abandoned chapel of an old castle.
A door hidden by a black drapery opened on to this room; behind the
drapery one guessed the hidden light of tapers, and it seemed to
Eliphas that, driven by a curiosity full of terror, he was approaching
the black drapery. ... Then the drapery was parted, and a hand was
stretched forth and seized the arm of Eliphas. He saw no one, but he
heard a low voice which said in his ear:
"Come and see your father, who is about to die."
The magus awoke, his heart palpitating, and his forehead bathed in
sweat.
"What can this dream mean?" thought he. "It is long since my father
died; why am I told that he is going to die, and why has this warning
upset me?"
The following night, the same dream recurred with the same
circumstances; once more Eliphas awoke, hearing a voice in his ear
repeat:
"Come and see your father, who is about to die."
This repeated nightmare made a painful impression upon Eliphas: he had
accepted, for the 3^rd January, an invitation to dinner in pleasant
company, but he wrote and excused himself, feeling himself little
inclined for the gaiety of a banquet of artists. He remained, then, in
his study; the weather was cloudy; at midday he received a visit from
one of his magical {166} pupils, Viscount M------. When he left, the
rain was falling in such abundance that Eliphas offered his umbrella to

the Viscount, who refused it. There followed a contest of politeness,
of which the result was that Eliphas went out to see the Viscount home.
While they were in the street, the rain stopped, the Viscount found a
carriage, and Eliphas, instead of returning to his house, mechanically
crossed the Luxembourg, went out by the gate which opens on the Rue
dEnfer, and found himself opposite the Pantheon.
A double row of booths, improvised for the Festival of St. Genevieve,
indicated to pilgrims the road to St. Etienne-du-Mont. Eliphas, whose
heart was sad, and consequently disposed to prayer, followed that way
and entered the church. It might have been at that time about four
oclock in the afternoon.
The church was full of the faithful, and the office was performed with
great concentration, and extraordinary solemnity. The banners of the
parishes of the city, and of the suburbs, bore witness to the public
veneration for the virgin who saved Paris from famine and invasion. At
the bottom of the church, the tomb of St. Genevieve shone gloriously
with light. They were chanting the litanies, and the procession was
coming out of the choir.
After the cross, accompanied by its acolytes, and followed by the
choirboys, came the banner of St. Genevieve; then, walking in double
file, came the lady devotees of St. Genevieve, clothed in black, with a
white veil on the head, a blue ribbon around the neck, with the medal
of the legend, a taper in the hand, surmounted by the little gothic
lantern that tradition gives to the images of the saint. For, in the
old books, {167} St Genevieve is always represented with a medal on her
neck, that which St. Germain dAuxerre gave her, and holding a taper,
which the devil tries to extinguish, but which is protected from the
breath of the unclean spirit by a miraculous little tabernacle.
After the lady devotees came the clergy; then finally appeared the
venerable Archbishop of Paris, mitred with a white mitre, wearing a
cope which was supported on each side by his two vicars; the prelate,
leaning on his cross, walked slowly, and blessed to right and left the
crowd which knelt about his path. Eliphas saw the Archbishop for the
first time, and noticed the features of his countenance. They expressed
kindliness and gentleness; but one might observe the expression of a
great fatigue, and even of a nervous suffering painfully dissimulated.
The procession descended to the foot of the church, traversing the
nave, went up again by the aisle at the left of the door, and came to
the station of the tomb of St. Genevieve; then it returned by the
right-hand aisle, chanting the litanies as it went. A group of the
faithful followed the procession, and walked immediately behind the
Archbishop.
Eliphas mingled in this group, in order more easily to get through the
crowd which was about to reform, so that he might regain the door of
the church. He was lost in reverie, softened by this pious solemnity.
The head of the procession had already returned to the choir, the
Archbishop was arriving at the railing of the nave: there the passage
was too narrow for three people to walk in file; the Archbishop was in
front, and the two grand-vicars behind him, always holding the edges of
his cope, which was {168} thus thrown off, and drawn backwards, in such
a manner that the prelate presented his breast uncovered, and protected
only the by crossed embroideries of his stole.
Then those who were behind the Archbishop saw him tremble, and we heard
an interruption in a loud and clear voice; but without shouting, or
clamour. What had been said? It seemed that it was: "Down with the
goddesses!" But I thought I had not heard aright, so out of place and
void of sense it seemed. However, the exclamation was repeated twice or
thrice; then some one cried: "Save the Archbishop!" Other voices
replied: "To arms!" The crowd, overturning the chairs and the barriers,
scattered, and rushed towards the doors shrieking. Amidst the wails of
the children, and the screams of the women, Eliphas, carried away by
the crowd, found himself somehow or other out of the church; but the
last look that he was able to cast upon it was smitten with a terrible
and ineffaceable picture!
In the midst of a circle made large by the affright of all those who
surrounded him, the prelate was standing alone, leaning always on his
cross, and held up by the stiffness of his cope, which the grand-vicars
had let go, and which accordingly hung down to the ground.
The head of the Archbishop was a little thrown back, his eyes and his
free hand raised to heaven. His attitude was that which Eugene
Delacroix has given to the Bishop of Liege in the picture of his
assassination by the bandits of the Wild Boar of the Ardennes;<
from Sir Walter Scotts Notes on the murder of the Bishop of Liege:
"The Bishops murder did not take place till 1482. In the months of
August and September of that year, "William del la Marck," called The
Wild Boar of the Ardennes. entered into a conspiracy with the
discontented citizens of Liege against their Bishop, Louis of Bourbon,
being aided with considerable sums of money by the King of France. By
this means and with the assistance of many murderers and banditti, who
thronged to him as to a leader befitting them, De la Marck assembled a
body of troops. With this little army he approached the city of Liege.
Upon this, the citizens, who were engaged in the conspiracy, came to
their Bishop, and, offering to stand by him to the death, exhorted him
to march out against these robbers. The Bishop, therefore, put himself
at the head of a few troops of his own, trusting to the assistance of
the people of Liege. But as soon as they came in sight of the enemy,
the citizens, as before agreed, fled from the Bishops banner, and he
was left with his own handful of adherents. At this moment De la Marck
charged at the head of his men with the expected success. The Bishop
was brought before De la Marck, who first cut him over the face, then
murdered him with his own hand, and caused his body to be exposed naked
in the great square of Liege before St. Lamberts Cathedral."
Three years after the Bishops death, Maximilian, Emperor of Austria,
caused De la Marck to be be arrested at Utrecht, where he was beheaded
in 1485.>> there was in his gesture the whole {169} epic or martyrdom;
it was an acceptance and an offering; a prayer for his people, and a
pardon for his murderer.
The day was falling, and the church was beginning to grow dark. The
Archbishop, his arms raised to heaven, lighted by a last ray which
penetrated the casements of the nave, stood out upon a dark background,
where one could scarcely distinguish a pedestal without a statue, on
which were written these two words of the Passion of Christ: ECCE HOMO!
and farther in the background, an apocalyptic painting representing the
four plagues ready to let themselves loose upon the world, and the
whirlwinds of hell, following the dusty traces of the pale horse of
death.
Before the Archbishop, a lifted arm, sketched in shadow like an
infernal silhouette, held and brandished a knife. Policemen, sword in
hand, were running up.
And while all this tumult was going on at the bottom of the church, the
singing of the litanies continued in the choir, {170} as the harmony of
the orbs of heaven goes on for ever, careless of our revolutions and of
our anguish.
Eliphas Levi had been swept out of the church by the crowd. He had come
out by the right-hand door. Almost at the same moment the left-hand
door was flung violently open, and a furious group of men rushed out of
the church.
This group was whirling around a man whom fifty arms seemed to hold,
whom a hundred shaken fists sought to strike.
This man later complained of having been roughly handled by the police,
but, as far as one could see in such an uproar, the police were rather
protecting him against the exasperation of the mob.
   Women were running after him, shrieking: "Kill him!"
   "But what has he done?" cried other voices.
   "The wretch! He has struck the Archbishop with his fist!" said the
   women.
   Then others came out of the church, and contradictory accounts were
   flying to and fro.
   "The archbishop was frightened, and has fainted," said some.
   "He is dead!" replied others.
   "Did you see the knife?" added a third comer. "It is as long as a
   sabre, and the blood was steaming on the blade."
   "The poor Archbishop has lost one of his slippers," remarked an old
   woman, joining her hands.
"It is nothing! It is nothing!" cried a woman who rented chairs. "You
can come back to the church: Monseigneur is not hurt; they have just
said so from the pulpit."
The crowd then made a movement to return to the church. {171}
"Go! Go!" said at that very moment the grave and anguished voice of a
priest. "The office cannot be continued; we are going to close the
church: it is profaned."
"How is the Archbishop?" said a man.
"Sir," replied the priest, "the Archbishop is dying; perhaps even at
this very moment he is dead!"
The crowd dispersed in consternation to spread the mournful news over
Paris.
A bizarre incident happened to Eliphas, and made a kind of diversion
for his deep sorrow at what had just passed.
At the moment of the uproar, an aged woman of the most respectable
appearance had taken his arm, and claimed his protection.
He made it a duty to reply to this appeal, and when he had got out of
the crowd with this lady: "How happy I am," said she, "to have met a
man who weeps for this great crime, for which, at this moment, so many
wretches rejoice!"
"What are you saying, madam? How is it possible that there should exist
beings so depraved as to rejoice at so great a misfortune?"
"Silence!" said the old lady; "perhaps we are overheard. ... Yes," she
added, lowering her voice; "there are people who are exceedingly
pleased at what has happened. And look there, just now, there was a man
of sinister mien, who said to the anxious crowd, when they asked him
what had happened, Oh, it is nothing! It is a spider which has
fallen."<
authors of the Grimoires concealed "child" beneath "kid," so Levi is
careful to disguise his true attitude to the Church which he wished to
destroy. --- O. M.>>
"No, madam, you must have misunderstood. The crowd {172} would not have
suffered so abominable a remark, and the man would have been
immediately arrested."<
as Levi, of course, could do. This is the point of his irony. --- O.
M.>>
"Would to God that all the world thought as you do!" said the lady.
Then she added: "I recommend myself to your prayers, for I see clearly
that you are a man of God."
"Perhaps every one does not think so," replied Eliphas.
"And what does the world matter to us?" replied the lady with vivacity;
"the world lies and calumniates, and is impious! It speaks evil of you,
perhaps. I am not surprised at it, and if you knew what it says of me,
you would easily understand why I despise its opinion!"
   "The world speaks evil of you, madam?"
   "Yes, in truth, and the greatest evil that can be said."
   "How so?"
   "It accuses me of sacrilege."
   "You frighten me. Of what sacrilege, if you please?"
   "Of an unworthy comedy that I am supposed to have played in order to
   deceive two children, on the mountain of the Salette."
   "What! You must be ------"
   "I am Mademoiselle de la Merliere."

"I have heard speak of your trial, mademoiselle, and of the scandal
which it caused, but it seems to me that your age and your position
ought to have sheltered you from such an accusation."
"Come and see me, sir, and I will present you to my lawyer, M. Favre,
who is a man of talent whom I wish to gain to God." {173}
Thus talking, the two companions had arrived at the Rue du Vieux
Colombier. The Lady thanked her improvised cavalier, and renewed her
invitation to come to see her.
"I will try to do so," said Eliphas; "but if I come shall I ask the
porter for Mille. de la Merliere?"
"Do not do so," said she; "I am not know under that name; ask for Mme.
Dutruck."
"Dutruck, certainly, madam; I present my humble compliments."
And they separated.
The trial of the assassin began, and Eliphas, reading in the newspapers
that the man was a priest, that he had belonged to the clergy of St.
Germain lAuxerrois, that he had been a country vicar, and that he
seemed exalted to the point of madness, recalled the pale priest who, a
year earlier, had been looking for the "grimoire" of Honorius. But the
description which the public sheets gave of the criminal disagreed with
the recollection of the Professor of Magic. In fact, the majority of
the papers said that he had black hair. ... "It is not he, then,"
thought Eliphas. "However, I still keep in my ear and in my memory the
word which would now be explained for me by this great crime: You will
soon learn something. Before a little, you will hear speak of me."
The trial took place with all the frightful vicissitudes with which
every one is familiar, and the accused was condemned to death.
The next day, Eliphas read in a legal newspaper the account of this
unheard-of scene in the annals of justice, but a cloud passed over his
eyes when he came to the description of the accused: "He is blond."
{174}
   "It must be he," said the Professor of Magic.
   Some days afterwards, a person who had been able to sketch the
   convict during the trial, showed it to Eliphas.
   "Let me copy this drawing," said he, all trembling with fear.
He made the copy, and took it to his friend Desbarrolles, of whom he
asked, without other explanation:
   "Do you know this head?"
   "Yes," said Desbarrolles energetically. "Wait a moment: yes, it is
   the mysterious priest whom we saw at Mme. A------s, and who wanted
   to make magical evocations."

"Oh, well, my friend, you confirm me in my sad conviction. The man we
saw, we shall never see again; the hand which you examined has become a
bloody hand. We have heard speak of him, as he told us we should; that
pale priest, do you know what was his name?"
"Oh, my God!" said Desbarolles, changing colour, "I am afraid to know
it!"
"Well, you know it: it was the wretch Louis Verger!"
Some weeks after what we have just recorded, Eliphas Levi was talking
with a bookseller whose specialty was to make a collection of old books
concerning the occult sciences. They were talking of the "grimoire" of
Honorius.
"Now-a-days, it is impossible to find it," said the merchant. "The last
that I had in my hands I sold to a priest for a hundred francs."
   "A young priest? And do you remember what he looked like?"
   "Oh, perfectly, but you ought to know him well yourself, {175} for
   he told me he had seen you, and it is I who sent him to you."
No more doubt, then; the unhappy priest had found the fatal "grimoire,"
he had done the evocation, and prepared himself for the murder by a
series of sacrileges. For this is in what the infernal evocations
consist, according to the "grimoire" of Honorius:<
loose paraphrase and deliberate distortion of the first preparations
and orison following the "Bull of Honorius" in the early part of the
Grimoire. Not only is the book libeled to Honorius III, instead of
Honorius II as Levi states (Waite says Honorous I!), but the
"diabolical signatures" are totally different from those described by
Levi! Levis changes obscure the text and add false linkages to
"satanic" language, in addition to exaggerating the very real
sacrileges. A brief account of this Grimoire will be found in the
"Thelema Lodge Calendar" for March 1989 e.v. A translation of the the
actual Grimoire will be found in Idries Shahs "The Secret Lore of
Magic", Citadel Press, New York, 1970.>>
   "Choose a black cock, and give him the name of the spirit of
   darkness which one wishes to evoke.
   "Kill the cock, and keep its heart, its tongue, and the first
   feather of its left wing.
   "Dry the tongue and the heart, and reduce them to powder.
   "Eat no meat and drink no wine, that day.
   "On Tuesday, at dawn, say a mass of the angels.
"Trace upon the altar itself, with the feather of the cock dipped in
the consecrated wine, certain diabolical signatures (those of Mr.
Homes pencil, and the bloody hosts of Vintras).
"On Wednesday, prepare a taper of yellow wax; rise at midnight, and
alone, in the church, begin the office of the dead.
   "Mingle with this office infernal evocations.
   "Finish the office by the light of a single taper, extinguish it
   immediately, and remain without light in the church thus profaned
   until sunrise.
"On Thursday, mingle with the consecrated water the powder of the
tongue and heart of the black cock, and let the whole be swallowed by a
male lamb of nine days old. ..." {176}
The hand refuses to write the rest. It is a mixture of brutalizing
practices and revolting crimes, so constituted as to kill for evermore
judgment and conscience.<
earthquake and eclipse, employs an excess of yellow. --- O. M.>>
But in order to communicate with the phantom of absolute evil, to
realize that phantom to the point of seeing and touching it, is it not
necessary to be without conscience and without judgment?
There is doubtless the secret of this incredible perversity, of this
murderous fury, of this unwholesome hate against all order, all
ministry, all hierarchy, of this fury, above all, against the dogma
which sanctifies peace, obedience, gentleness, purity, under so
touching an emblem as that of a mother.
This wretch thought himself sure not to die. The Emperor, thought he,
would be obliged to pardon him; an honourable exile awaited him; his
crime would give him an enormous celebrity; his reveries would be
bought for their weight in gold by the booksellers. He would become
immensely rich, attract the notice of a great lady, and marry beyond
the seas. It is by such promises that the phantom of the devil, long
ago, lured Gilles de Laval, Seigneur of Retz, and made him wade from
crime to crime. A man capable of evoking the devil, according to the
rites of the "grimoire" of Honorius, has gone so far upon the road of
evil that he is disposed to all kinds of hallucinations, and all lies.
So, Verger slept in blood, to dream of I know not what abominable
pantheon; and he awoke upon the scaffold.
But the aberrations of perversity do not constitute an insanity; the
execution of this wretch proved it. {177}
One knows what desperate resistance he made to his executioners. "It is
treason," said he; "I cannot die so! Only one hour, an hour to write to
the Emperor! The Emperor is bound to save me."
   Who, then, was betraying him?
   Who, then, had promised him life?
   Who, then, had assured him beforeh and of a clemency which was
   impossible, because it would revolt the conscience of the public?
   Ask all that of the "grimoire" of Honorius!
Two incidents in this tragic story bear upon the phenomena produced by
Mr. Home: the noise of the storm heard by the wicked priest in his
early evocations, and the difficulty which he found in expressing his
real thought in the presence of Eliphas Levi.
One may also comment upon the apparition of the sinister man taking
pleasure in the public grief, and uttering an indeed infernal word in
the midst of the consternation of the crowd, an apparition only noticed
by the ecstatic of La Salette, the too celebrated Mlle. de La Merliere,
who has the air after all of a worthy individual, but very excitable,
and perhaps capable of acting and speaking without knowing it herself,
under the influence of a sort of ascetic sleep-waking.
This word "sleep-waking" brings us back to Mr. Home, and our anecdotes
have not made us forget what the title of this work promised to our
readers.
   We ought, then, to tell them what Mr. Home is.
   We keep our promise.
"Mr. Home is an invalid suffering from a contagious sleep-waking."
{178}
This is an assertion.
It remains to us to give an explanation and a demonstration.
That explanation and demonstration, in order to be complete, demand a
work sufficient to fill a book.
That book has been written, and we shall publish it shortly.
Here is the title:
"The Reason of Miracles, or the Devil at the Tribunal of
Science."<
the book which we now publish. --- E. L.>>
"Why the devil?"
Because we have demonstrated by facts what Mr. de Mirville had, before
us, incompletely set forth.
We say "incompletely"; because the devil is, for Mr. de Mirville, a
fantastic personage, while for us, it is the misuse of a natural force.
   A medium once said: "Hell is not a place, it is a state."
   We shall be able to add: "The devil is not a person or a force; it
   is a vice, and in consequence, a weakness."
   Let us return for a moment to the study of phenomena!
   Mediums are, in general, of poor health and narrow limitations.
   They can accomplish nothing extraordinary in the presence of calm
   and educated persons.
   One must be accustomed to them before seeing or feeling anything.
The phenomena are not identical for all present. For example, where one
will see a hand, another will perceive nothing but a whitish smoke.
{179}
Persons impressed by the magnetism of Mr. Home feel a sort of
indisposition; it seems to them that the room turns round, and the
temperature seems to them to grow rapidly lower.
The miracles are more successful in the presence of a few people chosen
by the medium himself.
In a meeting of several persons, it may be that all will see the
miracles --- with the exception of one, who will see absolutely
nothing.
Among the persons who do see, all do not see the same thing.
Thus, for example:
One evening, at Mme. de V------s, the medium made appear a child which
that lady had lost. Mme. de B------ alone saw the child; Count de
M------ saw a little whitish vapour, in the shape of a pyramid; the
others saw nothing.

Everybody knows that certain substances, hashish, for example,

intoxicate without taking away the use of reason, and cause to be seen

with an astonishing vividness things which do not exist.
A great part of the phenomena of Mr. Home belong to a natural influence
similar to that of hashish.
This is the reason why the medium refuses to operate except before a
small number of persons chosen by himself.
The rest of these phenomena should be attri buted to magnetic power.
To see anything at Mr. Homes "seances" is not a reassuring index of
the health of him who sees.
And even if his health should be in other ways excellent, {180} the
vision indicates a transitory perturbation of the nervous apparatus in
its relation to imagination and light.
If this perturbation were frequently repeated, he would become
seriously ill.
Who knows how many collapses, attacks of tetanus, insanities, violent
deaths, the mania of table-turning has already produced?
These phenomena become particularly terrible when perversity takes
possession of them.
It is then that one can really affirm the intervention and the presence
of the spirit of evil.
Perversity or fatality, these pretended miracles obey one of these two
powers.
As to qabalistic writings and mysterious signatures, we shall say that
they reproduce themselves by the magnetic intuition of the mirages of
thought in the universal vital fluid.
These instinctive reflections may be produced if the magic Word has
nothing arbitrary in it, and if the signs of the occult sanctuary are
the natural expressions of absolute ideas.
It is this which we shall demonstrate in our book.
But, in order not to send back our readers from the unknown to the
future, we shall detach beforeh and two chapters of that unpublished
work, one upon the qabalistic Word, the other upon the secrets of the
Qabalah, and we shall draw conclusions which will compete in a manner
satisfactory to all the explanation which we have promised in the
matter of Mr. Home.
There exists a power which generates forms; this power is light. {181}
Light creates forms in accordance with the laws of eternal mathematics,
by the universal equilibrium of light and shadow.
The primitive signs of thought trace themselves by themselves in the
light, which is the material instrument of thought.
   God is the soul of light. The universal and infinite light is for
   us, as it were, the body of god.
   The Qabalah, or transcendental magic, is the science of light.
   Light corresponds to life.
   The kingdom of shadows is death.
   All the dogmas of true religion are written in the Qabalah in
   characters of light upon a page of shadow.
   The page of shadows consists of blind beliefs.
   Light is the great plastic medium.
   The alliance of the soul and the body is a marriage of light and
   shadow.
   Light is the instrument of the Word, it is the white writing of God
   upon the great book of night.
Light is the source of thought, and it is in it that one must seek for
the origin of all religious dogma. But there is only one true dogma, as
there is only one pure light; shadow alone is infinitely varied.
Light, shadow, and their harmony, which is the vision of beings, form
the principle analogous to the great dogmas of Trinity, of Incarnation,
and of Redemption.
Such is also the mystery of the cross.
It will be easy for us to prove this by an appeal to religious
monuments, by the signs of the primitive Word, by {182} those books
which contain the secrets of the Qabalah, and finally by the reasoned
explanation of all the mysteries by the means of the keys of qabalistic
magic.
In all symbolisms, in fact, we find ideas of antagonism and of harmony
producing a trinitarian notion in the conception of divinity, following
which the mythological personification of the four cardinal points of
heaven completes the sacred septenary, the base of all dogmas and of
all rites. In order to convince oneself of it, it is sufficient to read
again and meditate upon the learned work of Dupuis, who would be a
great qabalist if he had seen a harmony of truths where his negative
preoccupations only permitted him to see a concert of errors.
It is not here our business to repeat his work, which everybody knows;
but it is important to prove that the religious reform brought about by
Moses was altogether qabalistic, that Christianity, in instituting a
new dogma, has simply come nearer to the primitive sources of the
teachings of Moses, and that the Gospel is no more than a transparent
veil thrown upon the universal and natural mysteries of oriental
initiation.
A distinguished but little known man of learning, Mr. P. Lacour, in his
book on the Elohim or Mosaic God, has thrown a great light on that
question, and has rediscovered in the symbols of Egypt all the
allegorical figures of Genesis. More recently, another courageous
student of vast erudition, Mr. Vincent (de lYonne), has published a
treatise upon idolatry among both the ancients and the moderns, in
which he raises the veil of universal mythology.
We invite conscientious students to read these various {183} works, and
we confine ourselves to the special study of the Qabalah among the
Hebrews.
The Logos, or the word, being according to the initiates of that
science the complete revelation, the principles of the holy Qabalah
ought to be found reunited in the signs themselves of which the
primitive alphabet is composed.
Now, this is what we find in all Hebrew grammars.<
deliberately wrong. That Levi knew the correct attri butions is evident
from a M.S. annotated by himself. Levi refused to reveal these
attri butions, rightly enough, as his grade was not high enough, and the
time not ripe. Note the subtlety of the form of his statement. The
correct attri butions are in Liber 777. --- O. M.>>
There is a fundamental and universal letter which generates all the
others. It is the IOD.
There are two other mother letters, opposed and analogous among
themselves;,the ALEPH HB:Aleph and the MEM HB:Mem , according to others
the SCHIN HB:Shin .
There are seven double letters, the BETH HB:Bet , the GIMEL HB:Gemel ,
the DALETH HB:Dalet , the KAPH HB:Koph , the PE HB:Peh , the RESH
HB:Resh , and the TAU HB:Taw .
Finally, there are twelve simple letters; in all twenty-two. The unity
is represented, in a relative manner, by the ALEPH; the ternary is
figured either by IOD, MEM, SCHIN, or by ALEPH, MEM, SCHIN.
The septenary, by BETH, GIMEL, DALETH, KAPH, PE, RESH, TAU.
The duodenary, by the other letters.
The duodenary is the ternary multiplied by four; and it reenters thus
into the symbolism of the septenary.
Each letter represents a number: each assemblage of letters, a series
of numbers. {184}
The numbers represent absolute philosophical ideas.
The letters are shorth and hieroglyphs.
Let us see now the hieroglyphic and philosophical significations of
each of the twenty-two letters ("vide" Bellarmin, Reuchlin,
Saint-Jerome, Kabala denudata, Sepher Yetzirah, Technica curiosa of
Father Schott, Picus de Mirandola, and other authors, especially those
of the collection of Pistorius).

THE MOTHERS
   The IOD. --- The absolute principle, the productive being.
   The MEM. --- Spirit, or the Jakin of Solomon.
   The SCHIN. --- Matter, or the column called Boaz.

THE DOUBLE LETTERS
BETH. Reflection, thought, the moon, the Angel Gabriel, Prince of
mysteries.
GIMEL. Love, will, Venus, the Angel Anael, Prince of life and death.
DALETH. Force, power, Jupiter, Sachiel, Melech, King of kings.
KAPH. Violence, strife, work, Mars, Samael Zebaoth, Prince of
Phalanges.
PE. Eloquence, intelligence, Mercury, Raphael, Prince of sciences.
RESH. Destruction and regeneration, Time, Saturn, Cassiel, King of
tombs and of solitude.
TAU. Truth, light, the Sun, Michael, King of the Elohim. {185}

THE SIMPLE LETTERS
The simple letters are divided into four triplicities, having for
titles the four letters of the divine tetragam Yod-Heh-Vau-Heh.
In the divine tetragram, the IOD, as we have just said, symbolizes the
productive and active principle. --- The HE HB:Heh represents the
passive productive principle, the CTEIS. --- The VAU symbolizes the
union of the two, or the lingam, and the final HE is the image of the
second reproductive principle; that is to say, of the passive
reproduction in the world of effects and forms.
The twelve simple letters, HB:Qof HB:Tzaddi HB:Ayin HB:Samekh HB:Nun
HB:Lamed HB:Tet HB:Chet HB:Zain HB:Vau HB:Heh and HB:Yod or HB:Mem ,
divided into threes, reproduce the notion of the primitive triangle,
with the interpretation, and under the influence, of each of the
letters of the tetragram.
One sees that the philosophy and the religious dogma of the Qabalah are
there indicated in a complete but veiled manner.
Let us now investigate the allegories of Genesis.
"In the beginning (IOD the unity of being,) Elohim, the equilibrated
forces (Jakin and Boaz), created the heaven (spirit) and the earth
(matter), or in other words, good and evil, affirmation and negation."
Thus begins the Mosaic account of creation.
Then, when it comes to giving a place to man, and a sanctuary to his
alliance with divinity, Moses speaks of a garden, in the midst of which
a single fountain branched into four rivers (the IOD and the
TETRAGRAM), and then of two trees, one of life, and the other of death,
planted near the river. There are placed the man and the woman, the
active and the {186} passive; the woman sympathizes with death, and
draws Adam with her in her fall. They are then driven out from the
sanctuary of truth, and a kerub (a bull-headed sphinx, "vide" the
hieroglyphs of Assyria, of India and of Egypt) is placed at the gate of
the garden of truth in order to prevent the profane from destroying the
tree of life. Here we have mysterious dogma, with all its allegories
and its terrors, replacing the simplicity of truth. The idol has
replaced God, and fallen humanity will not delay to give itself up to
the worship of the golden calf.
The mystery of the necessary and successive reactions of the two
principles on each other is indicated subsequently by the allegory of
Cain and Abel. Force avenges itself by oppression for the seduction of
weakness; martyred weakness expiates and intercedes for force when it
is condemned for its crime to branding remorse. Thus is revealed the
equilibrium of the moral world; here is the basis of all the
prophecies, and the fulcrum of all intelligent political thought. To
abandon a force to its own excesses is to condemn it to suicide.
Dupuis failed to understand the universal religious dogma of the
Qabalah, because he had not the science of the beautiful hypothesis,
partly demonstrated and realized more from day to day by the
discoveries of science: I refer to "universal analogy."
Deprived of this key of transcendental dogma, he could see no more of
the gods than the sun, the seven planets, and the twelve signs of the
zodiac; but he did not see in the sun the image of the Logos of Plato,
in the seven planets the seven notes of the celestial gamut, and in the
zodiac the quadrature of the ternary circle of all initiations. {187}
The Emperor Julian, that "adept of the spirit" who was never
understood, that initiate whose paganism was less idolatrous than the
faith of certain Christians, the Emperor Julian, we say, understood
better than Dupuis and Volney the symbolic worship of the sun. In his
hymn to the king, Helios, he recognizes that the star of day is but the
reflection and the material shadow of that sun of truth which illumines
the world of intelligence, and which is itself only a light borrowed
from the Absolute.
It is a remarkable thing that Julian has ideas of the Supreme God, that
the Christians thought they alone adored, much greater and more correct
than those of some of the fathers of the Church, who were his
contemporaries, and his adversaries.
This is how he expresses himself in his defence of Hellenism:
"It is not sufficient to write in a book that God spake, and things
were made. It is necessary to examine whether the things that one
attri butes to God are not contrary to the very laws of Being. For, if
it is so, God could not have made them, for He could not contradict
Nature without denying Himself. ... God being eternal, it is of the
nature of necessity that His orders should be immutable as He."
So spake that apostate, that man of impiety! Yet, later, a Christian
doctor, become the oracle of the theological schools, taking his
inspiration perhaps from these splendid words of the misbeliever, found
himself obliged to bridle superstition by writing that beautiful and
brave maxim which easily resumes the thought of the great Emperor:
{188}
"A thing is not just because God wills it; but God wills it because it
is just."
The idea of a perfect and immutable order in nature, the notion of an
ascending hierarchy and of a descending influence in all beings, had
furnished to the ancient hierophants the first classification of the
whole of natural history. Minerals, vegetables, animals were studied
analogically; and they attri buted their origin and their properties to
the passive or to the active principle, to the darkness or to the
light. The sign of their election or of their reprobation, traced in
their natural form, became the hieroglyphic character of a vice or a
virtue; then, by dint of taking the sign for the thing, and expressing
the thing by the sign, they ended by confounding them. Such is the
origin of that fabulous natural history, in which lions allow
themselves to be defeated by cocks, where dolphins die of sorrow for
the ingratitude of men, in which mandrakes speak, and the stars sing.
This enchanted world is indeed the poetic domain of magic; but it has
no other reality than the meaning of the hieroglyphs which gave it
birth. For the sage who understands the analogies of the transcendental
Qabalah, and the exact relation of ideas with signs, this fabulous
country of the fairies is a country still fertile in discoveries; for
those truths which are too beautiful, or too simple to please men,
without any veil, have all been hidden in these ingenious shadows.
Yes, the cock can intimidate the lion, and make himself master of him,
because vigilance often supplants force, and succeeds in taming wrath.
The other fables of the sham natural history of the ancients are
explained in the same manner, and in this allegorical use of analogies,
one can {189} already understand the possible abuses and predict the
errors to which the Qabalah was obliged to give birth.
The law of analogies, in fact, has been for qabalists of a secondary
rank the object of a blind and fanatical faith. It is to this belief
that one must attri bute all the superstitions with which the adepts of
occult science have been reproached. This is how they reasoned:
   The sign expresses the thing.
   The thing is the virtue of the sign.
   There is an analogical correspondence between the sign and the thing
   signified.
   The more perfect is the sign, the more entire is the correspondence.
   To say a word is to evoke a thought and make it present. To name God
   is to manifest God.
The word acts upon souls, and souls react upon bodies; consequently one
can frighten, console, cause to fall ill, cure, even kill, and raise
from the dead by means of words.
To utter a name is to create or evoke a being.
In the name is contained the "verbal" or spiritual doctrine of the
being itself.
When the soul evokes a thought, the sign of that thought is written
automatically in the light.
To invoke is to adjure, that is to say, to swear by a name; it is to
perform an act of faith in that name, and to communicate in the virtue
which it represents.
Words in themselves are, then, good or evil, poisonous or wholesome.
The most dangerous words are vain and lightly uttered words, because
they are the voluntary abortions of thought. {190}
A useless word is a crime against the spirit of intelligence; it is an
intellectual infanticide.
Things are for every one what he makes of them by naming them. The
"word" of every one is an impression or an habitual prayer.
   To speak well is to live well.
   A fine style is an aureole of holiness.
From these principles, some true, others hypothetical, and from the
more or less exaggerated consequences that they draw from them, there
resulted for superstitious qabalists and absolute confidence in
enchantments, evocations, conjurations and mysterious prayers. Now, as
faith has always accomplished miracles, apparitions, oracles,
mysterious cures, sudden and strange maladies, have never been lacking
to it.
It is thus that a simple and sublime philosophy has become the secret
science of Black Magic. It is from this point of view above all that
the Qabalah is still able to excite the curiosity of the majority in
our so distrustful and so credulous century. However, as we have just
explained, that is not the true science.
Men rarely seek the truth from its own sake; they have always a secret
motive in their efforts, some passion to satisfy, or some greed to
assuage. Among the secrets of the Qabalah there is one above all which
has always tormented seekers; it is the secret of the transmutation of
metals, and of the conversion of all earthly substances into gold.
Alchemy borrowed all these signs from the Qabalah, and it is upon the
law of analogies resulting from the harmony of contraries that it based
its operations. An immense physical secret was, moreover, hidden under
the qabalistic {191} parables of the ancients. This secret we have
arrived at deciphering, and we shall submit its letter to the
investigations of the gold- makers. Here it is:
1 Degree. The four imponderable fluids are nothing but the diverse
manifestations of one same universal agent, which is light.
2 Degree. Light is the fire which serves for the Great Work under the
form of electricity.
3 Degree. The human will directs the vital light by means of the
nervous system. In our days this is called Magnetism.
4 Degree. The secret agent of the Great Work, the Azoth of the sages,
the living and life-giving gold of the philosophers, the universal
metallic productive agent, is MAGNETIZED ELECTRICITY.<
Levi indicates that he really knew the Great Arcanum; but only those
who also possess it can recognize it, and enjoy the joke. --- O.M.>>
The alliance of these two words still does not tell us much, and yet,
perhaps, they contain a force sufficient to overturn the world. We say
"perhaps" on philosophical grounds, for, personally, we have no doubt
whatever of the high importance of this great hermetic arcanum.
We have just said that alchemy is the daughter of the Qabalah; to
convince oneself of the truth of this it is sufficient to look at the
symbols of Flamel, of Basil Valentine, the pages of the Jew Abraham,
and the more or less apocryphal oracles of the Emerald Table of Hermes.
Everywhere one finds the traces of that decade of Pythagoras, which is
so magnificently applied in the Sepher Yetzirah to the complete and
absolute notion of divine things, that decade composed of unity and a
triple ternary which the Rabbis have {192} called the Berashith, and
the Mercavah, the luminous tree of the Sephiroth, and the key of the
Shemhamphorash.
We have spoken at some length in our book entitled "Dogme et rituel de
la haute magie" of a hieroglyphic monument (preserved up to our own
time under a futile pretext) which alone explains all the mysterious
writings of high initiation. This monument is that Tarot of the
Bohemians which gave rise to our games of cards. It is composed of
twenty-two allegorical letters, and of four series of ten hieroglyphs
each, referring to the four letters of the name of Jehovah. The diverse
combinations of those signs, and the numbers which correspond to them,
form so many qabalistic oracles, so that the whole science is contained
in this mysterious book. This perfectly simple philosophical machine
astonishes by the depth of its results.
The Abbe Trithemius, one of our greatest masters in magic, composed a
very ingenious work, which he calls Polygraphy,<
widely known as the "Stegonographia".>> upon the qabalistic alphabet.
It is a combined series of progressive alphabets where each letter
represents a word, the words correspond to each other, and complete
themselves from one alphabet to another; and there is no doubt that
Trithemius was acquainted with the Tarot, and made use of it to set his
learned combinations in logical order.
Jerome Cardan was acquainted with the symbolical alphabet of the
initiates, as one may recognize by the number and disposition of the
chapters of his work on Subtlety. This work, in fact, is composed of
twenty-two chapters, and the subject of each chapter is analogous to
the number and to the allegory of the corresponding card of the Tarot.
We {193} have made the same observation on a book of St. Martin
entitled "A Natural Picture of the Relations which exist between God,
Man and the Universe." The tradition of this secret has, then, never
been interrupted from the first ages of the Qabalah to our own
times.<
the Book of Job. Counting the title page as zero for the Fool Trump,
there are 22 illustrations numbered to match the Major Trumps, with a
few actually employing traditional design elements from the
corresponding Trumps.>>
The table-turners, and those who make the spirits speak with
alphabetical charts, are, then, a good many centuries behind the times;
they do not know that there exists an oracular instrument whose words
are always clear and always accurate, by means of which one can
communicate with the seven genii of the planets, and make to speak at
will the seventy-two wheels of Assiah, of Yetzirah, and of Briah. For
that purpose it is sufficient to understand the system of universal
analogies, such as Swedenborg has set it forth in the hieroglyphic key
of the arcana; then to mix the cards together, and draw from them by
chance, always grouping them by the numbers corresponding to the ideas
on which one desires enlightenment; then, reading the oracles as
qabalistic writings ought to be read, that is to say, beginning in the
middle and going from right to left for odd numbers, beginning on the
right for even numbers, and interpreting successively the number for
the letter which corresponds to it, the grouping of the letters by the
addition of their numbers, and all the successive oracles by their
numerical order, and their hieroglyphic relations.
This operation of the qabalistic sages, originally intended to discover
the rigorous development of absolute ideas, degenerated into
superstition when it fell into the hands of the ignorant priests and
the nomadic ancestors of the Bohemians who possessed the Tarot in the
Middle Ages; {194} they did not know how to employ it properly, and
used it solely for fortune-telling.
The game of chess, attri buted to Palamedes, has no other origin than
the Tarot,<
are worthless 18^th century fables. The "Bohemians", by which Levi
means the Gypsies, did not arrive in Europe until centuries after the
appearance of Tarot. Tarot may have imitated chess, but the antiquity
of the latter precludes any influence by the former.>> and one finds
there the same combinations and the same symbols: the king, the queen,
the knight, the soldier, the fool, the tower, and houses representing
numbers. In old times, chess-players sought upon their chess-board the
solution of philosophical and religious problems, and argued silently
with each other in manoeuvring the hieroglyphic characters across the
numbers.<
Enochian Chess on this suggestion.>> Our vulgar game of goose, revived
from the old Grecian game, and also attri buted to Palamedes, is nothing
but a chess-board with motionless figures and numbers movable by means
of dice. It is a Tarot disposed in the form of a wheel, for the use of
aspirants to initiation. Now, the word Tarot, in which one finds "rota"
and "tora," itself expresses, as William Postel has demonstrated, this
primitive disposition in the form of a wheel.
The hieroglyphs of the game of goose are simpler than those of the
Tarot, but one finds the same symbols in it: the juggler, the king, the
queen, the tower, the devil or Typhon, death, and so on. The
dice-indicated chances of the game represent those of life, and conceal
a highly philosophical sense sufficiently profound to make sages
meditate, and simple enough to be understood by children.
The allegorical personage Palamedes, is, however, identical with Enoch,
Hermes, and Cadmus, to whom various mythologies have attri buted the
invention of letters. But, in the conception of Homer, Palamedes, the
man who exposed the fraud of Ulysses and fell a victim to his revenge,
represents {195} the initiator or the man of genius whose eternal
destiny is to be killed by those whom he initiates. The disciple does
not become the living realization of the thoughts of the Master until
he had drunk his blood and eaten his flesh, to use the energetic and
allegorical expression of the initiator, so ill understood by
Christians.
The conception of the primitive alphabet was, as one may easily see,
the idea of a universal language which should enclose in its
combinations, and even in its signs themselves, the recapitulation and
the evolutionary law of all sciences, divine and human. In our own
opinion, nothing finer or greater has ever been dreamt by the genius of
man; and we are convinced that the discovery of this secret of the
ancient world has fully repaid us for so many years of sterile research
and thankless toil in the crypts of lost sciences and the cemeteries of
the past.
One of the first results of this discovery should be to give a new
direction to the study of the hieroglyphic writings as yet so
imperfectly deciphered by the rivals and successors of M. Champollion.
The system of writing of the disciples of Hermes being analogical and
synthetical, like all the signs of the Qabalah, would it not be useful,
in order to read the pages engraved upon the stones of the ancient
temples, to replace these stones in their place, and to count the
numbers of their letters, comparing them with the numbers of other
stones?
The obelisk of Luxor, for example, was it not one of the two columns at
the entrance of a temple? Was it at the right-hand or the left-hand
pillar? If at the right, these signs refer to the active principle; if
at the left, it is by the passive principle {196} that one must
interpret its characters. But there should be an exact correspondence
of one obelisk with the other, and each sign should receive its
complete sense from the analogy of contraries. M. Champollion found
Coptic in the hieroglyphics, another savant would perhaps find more
easily, and more fortunately, Hebrew; but what would one say if it were
neither Hebrew nor Coptic? If it were, for example, the universal
primitive language? Now, this language, which was that of the
transcendental Qabalah, did certainly exist; more, it still exists at
the base of Hebrew itself, and of all the oriental languages which
derive from it; this language is that of the sanctuary, and the columns
at the entrance of the temples ordinarily contained all its symbols.
The intuition of the ecstatics comes nearer to the truth with regard to
these primitive signs that even the science of the learned, because, as
we have said, the universal vital fluid, the astral light, being the
mediating principle between the ideas and the forms, is obedient to the
extraordinary leaps of the soul which seeks the unknown, and furnishes
it naturally with the signs already found, but forgotten, of the great
revelations of occultism. Thus are formed the pretended signatures of
spirits, thus were produced the mysterious writings of Gablidone, who
appeared to Dr. Lavater, the phantoms of Schroepfer, of St.
Michel-Vintras, and the spirits of Mr. Home.
If electricity can move a light, or even a heavy body, without one
touching it, is it impossible to give by magnetism a direction to
electricity, and to produce, thus naturally, signs and writings? One
can do it, doubtless; because one does it. {197}
   Thus, then, to those who ask us, "What is the most important agent
   of miracles?" we shall reply ---
   "It is the first matter of the Great Work.
   "It is MAGNETIZED ELECTRICITY."
   Everything has been created by light.
   It is in light that form is preserved.
   It is by light that form reproduces itself.
   The vibrations of light are the principle of universal movement.
   By light, the suns are attached to each other, and they interlace
   their rays like chains of electricity.
Men and things are magnetized by light like the suns, and, by means of
electro-magnetic chains whose tension is caused by sympathies and
affinities, are able to communicate with each other from one end of the
world to the other, to caress or strike, wound or heal, in a manner
doubtless natural, but invisible, and of the nature of prodigy.
   There is the secret of magic.
   Magic, that science which comes to us from the magi!
   Magic, the first of sciences!
   Magic, the holiest science, because it establishes in the sublimest
   manner the great religious truths!
Magic, the most calumniated of all, because the vulgar obstinately
confound magic with the superstitious sorcery whose abominable
practices we have denounced!
It is only by magic that one can reply to the enigmatical questions of
the Sphinx of Thebes, and find the solution of those problems of
religious history which are sealed in the sometimes scandalous
obscurities which are to be found in the stories of the Bible. {198}
The sacred historians themselves recognize the existence and the power
of the magic which boldly rivalled that of Moses.
The Bible tells us that Jannes and Jambres, Pharaohs magicians, at
first performed "the same miracles" as Moses, and that they declared
those which they could not imitate impossible to human science. It is
in fact more flattering to the self-love of a charlatan to deem that a
miracle has taken place, than to declare himself conquered by the
science or skill of a fellow-magician --- above all, when he is a
political enemy or a religious adversary.
When does the possible in magical miracles begin and end? Here is a
serious and important question. What is certain is the existence of the
facts which one habitually describes as miracles. Magnetizers and
sleep-wakers do them every day; Sister Rose Tamisier did them; the
"illuminated" Vintras does them still; more than fifteen thousand
witnesses recently attested those of the American mediums; ten thousand
peasants of Berry and Sologne would attest, if need were, those of the
god Cheneau (a retired button-merchant who believes himself inspired by
God). Are all these people hallucinated or knaves? Hallucinated, yes,
perhaps, but the very fact that their hallucination is identical,
whether separately or collectively, is it not a sufficiently great
miracle on the part of him who produces it, always, at will, and at a
stated time and place?
To do miracles, and to persuade the multitude that one does them, are
very nearly the same thing, above all in a century as frivolous and
scoffing as ours. Now, the world is full of wonder-makers, and science
is often reduced to denying their works or refusing to see them, in
order not to be reduced to examining them, or assigning a cause to
them. {199}
In the last century all Europe resounded with the miracles of
Cagliostro. Who is ignorant of what powers were attri buted to his wine
of Egypt, and to his elixir? What can we add to the stories that
they tell of his other- world suppers, where he made appear in flesh
and blood the illustrious personages of the past? Cagliostro was,
however, far from being an initiate of the first order, since the Great
White Brotherhood abandoned him<
say that God "abandoned" Christ. Martyrdom is usually cited on the
other side. Besides, the fate of Cagliostro is unknown --- at least to
the world at large. --- O. M.>> to the Roman Inquisition, before whom
he made, if one can believe the documents to his trial, so ridiculous
and so odious an explanation of the Masonic trigram, L.. P.. D..
But miracles are not the exclusive privilege of the first order of
initiates; they are often performed by beings without education or
virtue. Natural laws find an opportunity in an organism whose
exceptional qualifications are not clear to us, and they perform their
work with their invariable precision and calm. The most refined
gourmets appreciate truffles, and employ them for their purposes, but
it is hogs that dig them up: it is analogically the same for plenty of
things less material and less gastronomical: instincts have groping
presentiments, but it is really only science which discovers.
The actual progress of human knowledge has diminished by a great deal
the chances of prodigies, but there still remains a great number, since
both the power of the imagination and the nature and power of magnetism
are not yet known. The observation of universal analogies, moreover,
has been neglected, and for that reason divination is no longer
believed in. {200}
A qabalistic sage may, then, still astonish the crowd and even bewilder
the educated:
1 Degree --- By divining hidden things; 2 Degree --- by prediction many
things to come; 3 Degree --- by dominating the will of others so as to
prevent them doing what they will, and forcing them to do what they do

not will; 4 Degree --- by exciting apparitions and dreams; 5 Degree ---
by curing a large number of illnesses; 6 Degree --- by restoring life
to subjects who display all the symptoms of death; 7 Degree --- lastly,
by demonstrating (if need be, by examples) the reality of the

philosophical stone, and the transmutation of metals, according to the
secrets of Abraham the Jew, of Flamel, and of Raymond Lully.
All these prodigies are accomplished by means of a single agent which
the Hebrew calls OD, as did the Chevalier de Reichenback, which we,
with the School of Pasqualis Martinez, call astral light, which Mr. de
Mirville calls the devil, and which the ancient alchemists called
Azoth. It is the vital element which manifests itself by the phenomena
of heat, light, electricity and magnetism, which magnetizes all
terrestrial globes, and all living beings.
In this agent even are manifested the proofs of the qabalistic doctrine
with regard to equilibrium and motion, by double polarity; when one
pole attracts the other repels, one produces heat, the other cold, one
gives a blue or greenish light, the other a yellow or reddish light.
This agent, by its different methods of magnetization, attracts us to
each other, or estranges us from each other, subordinates one to the
wishes of the other by causing him to enter his centre of attraction,
re-establishes or disturbs the equilibrium in animal economy by its
transmutations and its {201} alternate currents, receives and transmits
the imprints of the force of imagination which is in men the image and
the semblance of the creative word, and thus produces presentiments and
determines dreams. The science of miracles is then the knowledge of
this marvellous force, and the art of doing miracles is simply the art
of magnetizing or "illuminating" beings, according to the invariable
laws of magnetism or astral light.
We prefer the word "light" to the word "magnetism," because it is more
traditional in occultism, and expresses in a more complete and perfect
manner the nature of the secret agent. There is, in truth, the liquid
and drinkable gold of the masters in alchemy; the word "OR" (the French
word for "gold") comes from the Hebrew "AOUR" which signifies "light."
"What do you wish?" they asked the candidate in every initiation: "To
see the light," should be their answer. The name of illuminati which
one ordinarily gives to adepts, has then been generally very badly
interpreted by giving to it a mystical sense, as if it signified men
whose intelligence believes itself to be lighted by a miraculous day.
Illuminati means simply, knowers and possessors of the light, either
by the knowledge of the great magical agent, or by the rational and
ontological notion of the absolute.
The universal agent is a force tractable and subordinate to
intelligence. Abandoned to itself, it, like Moloch, devours rapidly all
that to which it gives birth, and changes the superabundance of life
into immense destruction. It is, then, the infernal serpent of the
ancient myths, the Typhon of the Egyptians, and the Moloch of
Phoenicia; but if Wisdom, mother of the Elohim, puts her foot upon his
head, she outwears {202} all the flames which he belches forth, and
pours with full hands upon the earth a vivifying light. Thus also it is
said in the Zohar that at the beginning of our earthly period, when the
elements disputed among themselves the surface of the earth, that fire,
like an immense serpent, had enveloped everything in its coils, and was
about to consume all beings, when divine clemency, raising around it
the waves of the sea like a vestment of clouds, put her foot upon the
head of the serpent and made him re-enter the abyss. Who does not see
in this allegory the first idea, and the most reasonable explanation,
of one of the images dearest to Catholic symbolism, the triumph of the
Mother of God?
The qabalists say that the occult name of the devil, his true name, is
that of Jehovah written backwards. This, for the initiate, is a
complete revelation of the mysteries of the tetragram. In fact, the
order of the letters of that great name indicates the predominance of
the idea over form, of the active over the passive, of cause over
effect. By reversion that order one obtains the contrary. Jehovah is he
who tames Nature as it were a superb horse and makes it go where he
will; Chavajoh (the demon) is the horse without a bridle who, like
those of the Egyptians of the song of Moses, falls upon its rider, and
hurls him beneath it, into the abyss.
The devil, then, exists really enough for the qabalists; but it is
neither a person nor a distinguished power of even the forces of
Nature. The devil is dispersion, or the slumber of the intelligence. It
is madness and falsehood.
Thus are explained the nightmares of the Middle Ages; thus, too, are
explained the bizarre symbols of some initiates, those of the Templars,
for example, who are much less to be {203} blamed for having worshipped
Baphomet, than for allowing its image to be perceived by the profane.
Baphomet, pantheistic figure of the universal agent, is nothing else
than the bearded devil of the alchemists. One knows that the members of
the highest grades in the old hermetic masonry attri buted to a bearded
demon the accomplishment of the Great Work. At this word, the vulgar
hastened to cross themselves, and to hide their eyes, but the initiates
of the cult of Hermes-Pantheos understood the allegory, and were very
careful not to explain it to the profane.
Mr. de Mirville, in a book to-day almost forgotten, though it made some
noise a few months ago, gives himself a great deal of trouble to
compile an account of various sorceries, of the kind which fill the
compilations of people like Delancre, Delrio, and Bodin. He might have
found better than that in history. And without speaking of the easily
attested miracles of the Jansenists of Port Royal, and of the Deacon
Paris, what is more marvellous than the great monomania of martyrdom
which has made children, and even women, during three hundred years, go
to execution as if to a feast? What more magnificent than that
enthusiastic faith accorded during so many centuries to the most
incomprehensible, and, humanly speaking, to the most revolting
mysteries? On this occasion, you will say, the miracles came from God,
and one even employs them as a proof of the truth of religion. But,
what? heretics, too, let themselves be killed for dogmas, this time
quite frankly and really absurd. They then sacrificed both their reason
and their life to their belief? Oh, for heretics, it is evident that
the devil was responsible. Poor folk, who took the devil for God, and
God for the devil! Why have {204} they not been undeceived by making
them recognize the true God by the charity, the knowledge, the justice,
and above all, by the mercy of his ministers?
The necromancers who cause the devil to appear after a fatiguing and
almost impossible series of the most revolting evocations, are only
children by the side of that St. Anthony of the legend who drew them
from hell by thousands, and dragged them everywhere after him, like
Orpheus, who attracted to him oaks, rocks and the most savage animals.
Callot alone, initiated by the wandering Bohemians during his infancy
into the mysteries of black sorcery, was able to understand and
reproduce the evocations of the first hermit. And do you think that in
retracing those frightful dreams of maceration and fasting, the makers
of legends have invented? No; they have remained far below the truth.
The cloisters, in fact, have always been peopled with nameless
spectres, and their walls have palpitated with shadows and infernal
larvae. St. Catherine of Siena on one occasion passed a week in the
midst of an obscene orgy which would have discouraged the lust of
Pietro di Aretino; St. Theresa felt herself carried away living into
hell, and there suffered, between walls which ever closed upon her,
tortures which only hysterical women will be able to understand. ...
All that, one will say, happened in the imagination of the sufferers.
But where, then, would you expect facts of a supernatural order to take
place? What is certain is that all these visionaries have seen and
touched, that they have had the most vivid feeling of a formidable
reality. We speak of it from our own experience, and there are visions
of our own first youth, passed in retreat and asceticism, whose memory
makes us shudder even now. {205}
God and the devil are the ideals of absolute good and evil. But man
never conceives absolute evil, save as a false idea of good. Good only
can be absolute; and evil is only relative to our ignorance, and to our
errors. Every man, in order to be a God, first makes himself a devil;
but as the law of solidarity is universal, the hierarchy exists in hell
as it does in heaven. A wicked man will always find one more wicked
than himself to do him harm; and when the evil is at its climax, it
must cease, for it could only continue by the annihilation of being,
which is impossible. Then the man-devils, at the end of their
resources, fall once more under the empire of the god-men, and are
saved by those whom one at first thought their victims; but the man who
strives to live a life of evil deeds, does homage to good by all the
intelligence and energy that he develops in himself. For this reason
the great initiator said in his figurative language: "I would that thou
wert cold or hot; but because thou art lukewarm, I will spew thee out
of my mouth."
The Great Master, in one of his parables, condemns only the idle man
who buried his treasure from fear of losing it in the risky operations
of that bank which we call life. To think nothing, to love nothing, to
wish for nothing, to do nothing --- that is the real sin. Nature only
recognizes and rewards workers.
The human will develops itself and increases itself by its own
activity. In order to will truly, one must act. Action always dominates
inertia and drags it at its chariot wheels. This is the secret of the
influence of the alleged wicked over the alleged good. How many
poltroons and cowards think themselves virtuous because they are afraid
to be otherwise! {206} How many respectable women cast an envious eye
upon prostitutes! It is not very long ago since convicts were in
fashion. Why? Do you think that public opinion can ever give homage to
vice? No, but it can do justice to activity and bravery, and it is
right that cowardly knaves should esteem bold brigands.
Boldness united to intelligence is the mother of all successes in this
world. To undertake, one must know; to accomplish, one must will; to
will really, one must dare; and in order to gather in peace the fruits
of ones audacity, one must keep silent.
TO KNOW, TO DARE, TO WILL, TO KEEP SILENT, are, as we have said
elsewhere, the four qabalistic words which correspond to the four
letters of the tetragram and to the four hieroglyphic forms of the
Sphinx. To know, is the human head; to dare, the claws of the lion; to
will, the mighty flanks of the bull; to keep silent, the mystical wings
of the eagle. He only maintains his position above other men who does
not prostitute the secrets of his intelligence to their commentary and
their laughter.
All men who are really strong are magnetizers, and the universal agent
obeys their will. It is thus that they work marvels. They make
themselves believed, they make themselves followed, and when they say,
"This is thus," Nature changes (in a sense) to the eyes of the vulgar,
and becomes what the great man wished. "This is my flesh and this is my
blood," said a Man who had made himself God by his virtues; and
eighteen centuries, in the presence of a piece of bread and a little
wine, have seen, touched, tasted and adored flesh and blood made divine
by martyrdom! Say now, that the human will accomplishes no miracles!
{207}
Do not let us here speak of Voltaire! Voltaire was not a wonder-worker,
he was the witty and eloquent interpreter of those on whom the miracle
no longer acted. Everything in his work is negative; everything was
affirmative, on the contrary, in that of the "Galilean," as an
illustrious and too unfortunate Emperor called Him.
And yet Julian in his time attempted more than Voltaire could
accomplish; he wished to oppose miracles to miracles, the austerity of
power to that of revolt, virtues to virtues, wonders to wonders; the
Christians never had a more dangerous enemy, and they recognized the
fact, for Julian was assassinated; and the Golden Legend still bears
witness that a holy martyr, awakened in his tomb by the clamour of the
Church, resumed his arms, and struck the Apostate in the darkness, in
the midst of his army and of his victories. Sorry martyrs, who rise
from the dead to become hangmen! Too credulous Emperor, who believed in
his gods, and in the virtues of the past!
When the kings of France were hedged around with the adoration of their
people, when they were regarded as the Lords anointed, and the eldest
sons of the Church, they cured scrofula. A man who is the fashion can
always do miracles when he wishes. Cagliostro may have been only a
charlatan, but as soon as opinion had made of him "the divine
Cagliostro," he was expected to work miracles; and they happened.
When Cephas Barjona was nothing but a Jew proscribed by Nero, retailing
to the wives of slaves a specific for eternal life, Cephas Barjona, for
all educated people of Rome
, was only a charlatan; but public opinion made an apostle of the {208}
Spiritualistic empiric; and the successors of Peter, were they
Alexander VI, or even John XXII, are infallible for every man who is
properly brought up, who does not wish to put himself uselessly outside
the pale of society. So goes the world.
Charlatanism, when it is successful, is then, in magic as in everything
else, a great instrument of power. To fascinate the mob cleverly, is
not that already to dominate it? The poor devils of sorcerers who in
the Middle Ages stupidly got themselves burnt alive had not, it is easy
to see, a great empire on others. Joan of Arc was a magician at the
head of her armies, and at Rouen the poor girl was not even a witch.
She only knew how to pray, and how to fight, and the prestige which
surrounded her ceased as soon as she was in chains. Does history tell
us that the King of France demanded her release? That the French
nobility, the people, the army protested against her condemnation? The
Pope, whose eldest son was the King of France, did he excommunicate the
executioners of the Maid of Orleans? No, nothing of all that! Joan of
Arc was a sorceress for every one as soon as she ceased to be a
magician, and it was certainly not the English alone who burned her.
When one exercises an apparently superhuman power, one must exercise it
always, or resign oneself to perish. The world always avenges itself in
a cowardly way for having believed too much, admired too much, and
above all, obeyed too much.
We only understand magic power in its application to great matters. If
a true practical magician does not make himself master of the world, it
is that he disdains it. To what, then, would he degrade his sovereign
power? "I will give {209} thee all the kingdoms of the world, if thou
wilt fall at my feet and worship me," the Satan of the parable said to
Jesus. "Get thee behind me, Satan," replied the Saviour; "for it is
written, Thou shalt adore God alone." ... "ELI, ELI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!"
was what this sublime and divine adorer of God cried later. If he had
replied to Satan, "I will not adore thee, and it is thou who wilt fall
at my feet, for I bid thee in the name of intelligence and eternal
reason," he would not have consigned his holy and noble life to the
most frightful of all tortures. The Satan of the mountain was indeed
cruelly avenged!
The ancients called practical magic the sacerdotal and royal art, and
one remembers that the magi were the masters of primitive civilization,
because they were the masters of all the science of their time.
To know is to be able when one dares to will.
The first science of the practical qabalist, or the magus, is the
knowledge of men. Phrenology, psychology, chiromancy, the observation
of tastes and of movement, of the sound of the voice and of either
sympathetic or antipa thetic impressions, are branches of this art, and
the ancients were not ignorant of them. Gall and Spurzheim in our days
have rediscovered phrenology. Lavater, following Porta, Cardan,
Taisnier, Jean Belot and some others have divined anew rather than
rediscovered the science of psychology; chiromancy is still occult, and
one scarcely finds traces of it in the quite recent and very
interesting work of dArpentigny. In order to have sufficient notions
of it, one must remount to the qabalistic sources themselves from which
the learned Cornelius Agrippa drew water. It is, then, convenient to
say a few words {210} on the subject while waiting for the work of our
friend Desbarrolles.
The hand is the instrument of action in man: it is, like the face, a
sort of synthesis of the nervous system, and should also have features
and physiognomy. The character of the individual is traced there by
undeniable signs. Thus, among hands, some are laborious, some are idle,
some square and heavy, others insinuating and light. Hard and dry hands
are made for strife and toil, soft and damp hands ask only for
pleasure. Pointed fingers are inquisitive and mystical, square fingers
mathematical, spatulated fingers obstinate and ambitious.
The thumb, pollex, the finger of force and power, corresponds in the
qabalistic symbolism to the first letter of the name of Jehovah. This
finger is then a synthesis of the hand: if it is strong, the man is
morally strong; if it is weak, the man is weak. It has three phalanges,
of which the first is hidden in the palm of the hand, as the imaginary
axis of the world traverses the thickness of the earth. This first
phalanx corresponds to the physical life, the second to the
intelligence, the third to the will. Greasy and thick palms denote
sensual tastes and great force of physical life; a thumb which is long,
especially in its last phalanx, reveals a strong will, which may go as
far as despotism; short thumbs, on the contrary, show characters gentle
and easily controlled.
The habitual folds of the hand determine its lines. These lines are,
then, the traces of habits, and the patient observer will know how to
recognize them and how to judge them. The man whose hand folds badly is
clumsy or unhappy. The hand has three principal functions: to grasp, to
hold, and to {211} handle. The subtlest hands seize and handle best;
hard and strong hands hold longer. Even the lightest wrinkles bear
witness to the habitual sensations of the organ. Each finger has,
besides, a special function from which it takes its name. We have
already spoken of the thumb; the index is the finger which points out,
it is that of the word and of prophecy; the medius dominates the whole
hand, it is that of destiny; the ring-finger is that of alliances and
of honours: chiromancers have consecrated it to the sun; the little
finger is insinuating and talkative, at least, so say simple folk and
nursemaids, whose little finger tells them so much. The hand has seven
protuberances which the qabalists, following natural analogies, have
attri buted to the seven planets: that of the thumb, to Venus; that of
the index to Jupiter; that of the medius, to Saturn; that of the
ring-finger to the Sun; that of the little finger, to Mercury; the two
others to Mars and to the Moon. According to their form and their
predominance, they judged the inclinations, the aptitudes, and
consequently the probable destinies of the individuals who submitted
themselves to their judgment.
There is no vice which does not leave its trace, no virtue which has
not its sign. Thus, for the trained eyes of the observer, no hypocrisy
is possible. One will understand that such a science is already a power
indeed sacerdotal and royal.
The prediction of the principal events of life is already possible by
means of the numerous analogical probabilities of this observation: but
there exists a faculty called that of presentiments or sensitivism.
Events exist often in their causes before realizing themselves in
action; sensitives see in advance {212} the effects in the causes.
Previous to all great events, there have been most astonishing
predictions. In the reign of Louis Philippe we heard sleep-walkers and
ecstatics announce the return of the Empire, and specify the date of
its coming. The Republic of 1848 was clearly announced in the prophecy
of Orval, which dated at least from 1830 and which we strongly suspect
to be, like those works attri buted to the brothers Olivarius, the
posthumous work of Mlle. Lenormand. This is a matter of little
importance in this thesis.
That magnetic light which causes the future to appear, also causes
things at present existing, but hidden, to be guessed; as it is the
universal life, it is also the agent of human sensibility, transmitting
to some the sickness or the health of others, according to the fatal
influence of contracts, or the laws of the will. It is that which
explains the power of benedictions and of bewitchments so clearly
recognized by the great adepts, and above all by the wonderful
Paracelsus. An acute and judicious critic, Mr. Ch. Fauvety, in an
article published by the "Revue philosophique et religieuse,"
appreciates in a remarkable manner the advanced works of Paracelsus, of
Pomponacius, of Goglienus, or Crollis, and of Robert Fludd on
magnetism. But what our learned friend and collaborator studies only as
a philosophical curiosity, Paracelsus and his followers practised
without being very anxious that the world should understand it; for it
was for them one of those traditional secrets with regard to which
silence is necessary, and which it is sufficient to indicate to those
who know, leaving always a veil upon the truth for the ignorant.
Now here is what Paracelsus reserved for initiates alone, {213} and
what we have understood through deciphering the qabalistic characters,
and the allegories of which he makes use in his work:
The human soul is material; the divine "mens" is offered to it to
immortalize it and to make it live spiritually and individually, but
its natural substance is fluidic and collective.
There are, then, in man, two lives: the individual or reasonable life,
and the common or instinctive life. It is by this latter that one can
live in the bodies of others, since the universal soul, of which each
nervous organism has a separate consciousness, is the same for all.
We live in a common and universal life in the embryonic state, in
ecstasy, and in sleep. In sleep, in fact, reason does not act, and
logic, when it mingles in our dreams, only does so by chance, in
accordance with the accidents of purely physical reminiscences.
In dreams, we have the consciousness of the universal life; we mingle
ourselves with water, fire, air, and earth; we fly like birds; we climb
like squirrels; we crawl like serpents; we are intoxicated with astral
light; we plunge into the common reservoir, as happens in a more
complete manner in death; but then (and it is thus that Paracelsus
explains the mysteries of the other life) the wicked, that is to say,
those who have allowed themselves to be dominated by the instinct of
the brute to the prejudice of human reason, are drowned in the ocean of
the common life with all the anguish of eternal death; the others swim
upon it, and enjoy for ever the riches of that fluid gold which they
have succeeded in dominating.
This identity of all physical life permits the stronger {214} souls to
possess themselves of the existence of the others, and to make
auxiliaries of them; it explains sympathetic currents either near or
distant, and gives the whole secret of occult medicine, because the
principle of this medicine is the grand hypothesis of universal
analogies, and, attri buting all the phenomena of physical life to the
universal agent, teaches that one must act upon the astral body in
order to react upon the material visible body; it teaches also that the
essence of the astral light is a double movement of attraction and
repulsion; just as human bodies attract and repel one another, they can
also absorb themselves, extend one into another, and make exchanges;
the ideas or imaginations of one can influence the form of the other,
and subsequently react upon the exterior body.
Thus are produced the so strange phenomena of maternal impressions,
thus the neighbourhood of invalids gives bad dreams, and thus the soul
breathes in something unwholesome when in the company of fools and
knaves.
One may remark that in boarding-schools the children tend to assimilate
in physiognomy; each place of education has, so to speak, a family air
which is peculiar to it. In orphan schools conducted by nuns all the
girls resemble each other, and all take on that obedient and effaced
physiognomy which characterizes ascetic education. Men become handsome
in the school of enthusiasm, of the arts, and of glory; they become
ugly in prison, and of sad countenance in seminaries and in convents.
Here it will be understood we leave Paracelsus, in order that we may
investigate the consequences and applications of his ideas, which are
simply those of the ancient magi, and {215} to study the elements of
that physical Qabalah which we call magic.
According to the qabalistic principles formulated by the school of
Paracelsus, death is nothing but a slumber, ever growing deeper and
more definite, a slumber which it would not be impossible to stop in
its early stages by exercising a powerful action of will on the astral
body as it breaks loose, and by recalling it to life through some
powerful interest or some dominating affection. Jesus expressed the
same thought when he said to the daughter of Jairus: "The maiden is not
dead, but sleepeth"; and of Lazarus: "Our friend is fallen asleep, and
I go to wake him." To express this resurrectionist system in such a
manner as not to offend common sense, by which we mean generally-held
opinions, let us say that death, when there is no destruction or
essential alteration of the physical organs, is always preceded by a
lethargy of varying duration. (The resurrection of Lazarus, if we could
admit it as a scientific fact, would prove that this state may last for
four days.<
which happens frequently to healthy people, as well as to sick men, who
recover in spite of it. Besides, in the gospel story, it is one of the
bystanders who says that Lazarus "by this time stinketh, for he hath
been dead four days." One may then attri bute this remark to
imagination. --- E. L. Rather to the arrogance of the a priori
reasoner. --- TRANS.>>)
Let us now come to the secret of the Great Work, which we have given
only in Hebrew, without vowel points, in the "Rituel de la haute
magie." Here is the complete text in Latin, as one finds in on page 144
of the Sepher Yetzirah, commented by the alchemist Abraham (Amsterdam,
1642): {216}

SEMITA XXXI
Vocatur intelligentia perpetua; et quare vocatur ita? Eo quod ducit
motum solis et lunae juxta constitutionem eorum; utrumque in orbe sibi
conveniente.
Rabbi Abraham F.. D.. dicit:
Semita trigesima prima vocatur intelligentia perpetua: et illa ducit
solem et lunam et reliquas stellas et figuras, unum quodque in orbe
suo, et impertit omnibus creatis juxta dispositionem ad signa et
figuras.
Here is the French translation of the Hebrew text which we have
transcribed in our ritual:
"The thirty-first path is called the perpetual intelligence; and it
governs the sun and the moon, and the other stars and figures, each in
its respective orb. And it distributes what is needful to all created
things, according to their disposition to the signs and figures."
This text, one sees, is still perfectly obscure for whoever is not
acquainted with the characteristic value of each of the thirty-two
paths. The thirty-two paths are the ten numbers and the twenty-two
hieroglyphic letters of the Qabalah. The thirty-first refers to HB:Shin
, which represents the magic lamp, or the light between the horns of
Baphomet. It is the qabalistic sign of the OD, or astral light, with
its two poles, and its balanced centre. One knows that in the language
of the alchemist the sun signifies gold, the moon silver, and that the
other stars or planets refer to the other metals. One {217} should now
be able to understand the thought of the Jew Abraham.
The secret fire of the masters of alchemy was, then, electricity; and
there is the better half of their grand arcanum; but they knew how to
equilibrate its force by a magnetic influence which they concentrated
in their athanor. This is what results from the obscure dogmas of Basil
Valentine, of Bernard Trevisan, and of Henry Khunrath, who, all of
them, pretended to have worked the transmutation, like Raymond Lully,
like Arnaud de Villeneuve, and like NIcholas Flamel.
The universal light, when it magnetizes the worlds, is called astral
light; when it forms the metals, one calls it azoth, or philosophical
mercury; when it gives life to animals, it should be called animal
magnetism.
The brute is subject to the fatalities of this light; man is able to
direct it.
It is the intelligence which, by adapting the sign to the thought,
creates forms and images.
The universal light is like the divine imagination, and this world,
which changes ceaselessly, yet ever remaining the same with regard to
the laws of its configuration, is the vast dream of God.
Man formulates the light by his imagination; he attracts to himself the
light in sufficient quantities to give suitable forms to his thoughts
and even to his dreams; if this light overcomes him, if he drowns his
understanding in the forms which he evokes, he is mad. But the fluidic
atmosphere of madmen is often a poison for tottering reason and for
exalted imaginations.
The forms which the over-excited imagination produces {218} in order to
lead astray the understanding, are as real as photographic images. One
could not see what does not exist. The phantoms of dreams, and even the
dreams of the waking, are then real images which exist in the light.
There exist, besides these, contagious hallucinations. But we here
affirm something more than ordinary hallucinations.
If the images attracted by diseased brains are in some sense real, can
they not throw them without themselves, as real as they relieve them?
These images projected by the complete nervous organism of the medium,
can they not affect the compete organism of those who, voluntarily or
not, are in nervous sympathy with the medium?
The things accomplished by Mr. Home prove that all this is possible.
Now, let us reply to those who think that they see in these phenomena
manifestations of the other world and facts of necromancy.
We shall borrow our answer from the sacred book of the qabalists, and
in this our doctrine is that of the rabbis who compiled the Zohar.

AXIOM
The spirit clothes itself to descend, and strips itself to rise.
In fact:
Why are created spirits clothed with bodies?
It is that they must be limited in order to have a possible existence.
Stripped of all body, and become consequently {219} without limit,
created spirits would lose themselves in the infinite, and from lack of
the power to concentrate themselves somewhere, they would be dead and
impotent everywhere, lost as they would be in the immensity of God.
All created spirits have, then, bodies, some subtler, some grosser,
according to the surroundings in which they are called to live.
The soul of a dead man would, then, not be able to live in the
atmosphere of the living, any more than we can live in earth or in
water.
For an airy, or rather an ethereal, spirit, it would be necessary to
have an artificial body similar to the apparatus of our divers, in
order that it might come to us.
All that we can see of the dead are the reflections which they have
left in the atmospheric light, light whose imprints we evoke by the
sympathy of our memories.
The souls of the dead are above our atmosphere. Our respirable air
becomes earth for them. This is what the Saviour declares in His
Gospel, when He makes the soul of a saint say:
"Now the great abyss is established between us, and those who are above
can no longer descend to those who are below."
The hands which Mr. Home causes to appear are, then, composed of air
coloured by the reflection which his sick imagination attracts and
projects.<<"The luminous agent being also that of heat, one understands
the sudden variations of temperature occasioned by the abnormal
projections or sudden absorptions of the light. There follows a sudden
atmospheric perturbation, which produces the noise of storms, and the
creaking of woodwork." --- E. L.>> {220}
One touches them as one sees them; half illusion, half magnetic and
nervous force.
These, it seems to us, are very precise and very clear explanations.
Let us reason a little with those who support the theory of apparitions
from another world:
   Either those hands are real bodies, or they are illusions.
   If they are bodies, they are, then, not spirits.
   If they are illusions produced by mirages, either in us, or outside
   ourselves, you admit my argument.
   Now, one remark!
   It is that all those who suffer from luminous congestion or
   contagious somnambulism, perish by a violent or, at least, a sudden
   death.
   It is for this reason that one used to attri bute to the devil the
   power of strangling sorcerers.
   The excellent and worthy Lavater habitually evoked the alleged
   spirit of Gablidone.
   He was assassinated.
   A lemonade-seller of Leipzig, Schroepfer, evoked the animated images
   of the dead. He blew out his brains with a pistol.
   One knows what was the unhappy end of Cagliostro.
   A misfortune greater than death itself is the only thing that can
   save the life of these imprudent experimenters.
   They may become idiots or madmen, and then they do not die, if one
   watches over them with care to prevent them from committing suicide.
   Magnetic maladies are the road to madness; they are {221} always
   born from the hypertrophy or atrophy of the nervous system.
   They resemble hysteria, which is one of their varieties, and are
   often produced either by excesses of celibacy, or those or exactly
   the opposite kind.
One knows how closely connected with the brain are the organs charged
by Nature with the accomplishment of her noblest work: those whose
object is the reproduction of being.
One does not violate with impunity the sanctuary of Nature.
Without risking his own life, no one lifts the veil of the great Isis.
Nature is chaste, and it is to chastity that she gives the key of life.
To give oneself up to impure loves is to plight ones troth to death.
Liberty, which is the life of the soul, is only preserved in the order
of Nature. Every voluntary disorder wounds it, prolonged excess murders
it.
Then, instead of being guided and preserved by reason, one is abandoned
to the fatalities of the ebb and flow of magnetic light.
The magnetic light devours ceaselessly, because it is always creating,
and because, in order to produce continually, one must absorb
eternally.
Thence come homicidal manias and temptations to commit suicide.
Thence comes that spirit of perversity which Edgar Poe has described in
so impressive and accurate a manner, and which Mr. de Mirville would be
right to call the devil. {222}
The devil is the giddiness of the intelligence stupefied by the
irresolution of the heart.
It is a monomania of nothingness, the lure of the abyss; independently
of what it may be according to the decisions of the Catholic,
Apostolic, and Roman faith, which we have not the temerity to touch.
As to the reproduction of signs and characters by that universal fluid,
which we call astral light, to deny its possibility would be to take
little account of the most ordinary phenomena of Nature.
The mirage in the steppes of Russia, the palace of Morgan le Fay, the
figures printed naturally in the heart of stones which Gaffael calls
"gamahes," the monstrous deformities of certain children caused by
impressions of the nightmares of their mothers, all these phenomena and
many others prove that the light is full of reflections and images
which it projects and reproduces according to the evocations of the
imagination, of memory, or of desire. Hallucination is not always an
objectless reverie: as soon as every one sees a thing it is certainly
visible; but if this thing is absurd one must rigorously conclude that
everybody is deceived or hallucinated by a real appearance.
To say (for example) that in the magnetic parties of Mr. Home real and
living hands come out of the tables, true hands which some see, others
touch, and by which still others feel themselves touched without seeing
them, to say that these really corporeal hands are hands of spirits, is
to speak like children or madmen; it implies a contradiction in terms.
But to deem that such or such apparitions, such or such sensations, are
produced, is simply to be sincere, and to mock {223} the mockery of the
normal man, even when these normal men are as witty as this or that
editor of this or that comic journal.
These phenomena of the light which produce apparitions always appear at
epochs when humanity is in labour. They are phantoms of the delirium of
the world-fever; it is the hysteria of a bored society. Virgil tells us
in fine verse that in the time of Caesar Rome was full of spectres; in
the time of Vespasian the gates of the Temple of Jerusalem opened of
themselves, and a voice was heard crying, "The gods depart." Now, when
the gods depart, the devils return. Religious feeling transforms itself
into superstition when faith is lost; for souls need to believe,
because they thirst for hope. How can faith be lost? How can science
doubt the infinite harmony? Because the sanctuary of the absolute is
always closed for the majority. But the kingdom of truth, which is that
of God, suffers violence, and the violent must take it by force. There
exists a dogma, there exists a key, there exists a sublime tradition;
and this dogma, this key, this tradition is transcendental magic. There
only are found the absolute of knowledge and the eternal bases of law,
guardian against all madness, all superstition and all error, the Eden
of the intelligence, the ease of the heart, and the peace of the soul.
We do not say this in the hope of convincing the scoffer, but only to
guide the seeker. Courage and good hope to him; he will surely find,
since we ourselves have found.
The magical dogma is not that of the mediums. The mediums who dogmatize
can teach nothing but anarchy, since their inspiration is drawn from a
disordered exaltation. They are always predicting disasters; they deny
hierarchical authority; they pose, like Vintras, as sovereign pontiffs.
{224} The initiate, on the contrary, respects the hierarchy before all,
he loves and preserves order, he bows before sincere beliefs, he loves
all signs of immortality in faith, and of redemption by charity, which
is all discipline and obedience. We have just read a book published
under the influence of astral and magnetic intoxication, and we have
been struck by the anarchical tendencies with which it is filled under
a great appearance of benevolence and religion. At the head of this
book one sees the symbol, or, as the magi call it, "the signature," of
the doctrines which it teaches. Instead of the Christian cross, symbol
of harmony, alliance and regularity, one sees the tortuous tendrils of
the vine, jutting from its twisted stem, images of hallucination and of
intoxication.
The first ideas set forth by this book are the climax of the absurd.
The souls of the dead, it says, are everywhere, and nothing any longer
hems them in. It is an infinite overcrowded with gods, returning the
one into the other. The souls can and do communicate with us by means
of tables and hats. And so, no more regulated instruction, no more
priesthood, no more Church, delirium set upon the throne of truth,
oracles which write for the salvation of the human race the word
attri buted to Cambronne, great men who leave the serenity of their
eternal destinies to make our furniture dance, and to hold with us
conversations like those which Beroalde de Verville<---
died in 1612. Author of "Le Moyen de Parvenir." The Bibliophile Jacob
suggests that Verville stole his "Moyen de Parvenir" from a lost book
of Rabelais. Verville was a Canon of St. Gatien, Tours, and is
associated with Tours and Touraine. Balzacs "Contes Drolatiques" were
deemed to have been more inspired by Verville than by Rabelais. ---
TRANS.>> makes them hold, in "Le Moyen de Parvenir." All this is a
great pity; and yet, in America, all this is {225} spreading like an
intellectual plague. Young America raves, she has fever; she is,
perhaps, cutting her teeth. But France! France to accept such things!
No, it is not possible, and it is not so. But while they refuse the
doctrines, serious men should observe the phenomena, remain calm in the
midst of the agitations of all the fanaticisms (for incredulity also
has its own), and judge after having examined.
To preserve ones reason in the midst of madmen, ones faith in the
midst of superstitions, ones dignity in the midst of buffoons, and
ones independence among the sheep of Panurge, is of all miracles the
rarest, the finest, and the most difficult to accomplish.

CHAPTER IV
FLUIDIC PHANTOMS AND THEIR MYSTERIES
THE ancients gave different names to these: larvae, lemures (empuses).
They loved the vapour of shed blood, and fled from the blade of the
sword.
Theurgy evoked them, and the Qabalah recognized them under the name of
elementary spirits.
They were not spirits, however, for they were mortal.
They were fluidic coagulations which one could destroy by dividing
them.
There were a sort of animated mirages, imperfect emanations of human
life. The traditions of Black Magic say that they were born owing to
the celibacy of Adam. Paracelsus says that the vapours of the blood of
hysterical women people the air with phantoms; and these ideas are so
ancient, that {226} we find traces of them in Hesiod, who expressly
forbids that linen, stained by a pollution of any sort, should be dried
before a fire.
Persons who are obsessed by phantoms are usually exalted by too
rigorous celibacy, or weakened by excesses.
Fluidic phantoms are the abortions of the vital light; they are plastic
media without body and without spirit, born from the excesses of the
spirit and the disorders of the body.
These wandering media may be attracted by certain degenerates who are
fatally sympathetic to them, and who lend them at their own cost a
factitious existence of a more or less durable kind. They then serve as
supplementary instruments to the instinctive volitions of these
degenerates: never to cure them, always to send them farther astray,
and to hallucinate them more and more.
If corporeal embryos can take the forms which the imagination of their
mothers gives them, the wandering fluidic embryos ought to be
prodigiously variable, and to transform themselves with an astonishing
facility. Their tendency to give themselves a body in order to attract
a soul, makes them condense and assimilate naturally the corporeal
molecules which float in the atmosphere.
Thus, by coagulating the vapour of blood, they remake blood, that blood
which hallucinated maniacs see floating upon pictures or statues. But
they are not the only ones to see it. Vintras and Rose Tamisier are
neither impostors nor myopics; the blood really flows; doctors examine
it, analyse it; it is blood, real human blood: whence comes it? Can it
be formed spontaneously in the atmosphere? Can it naturally flow from a
marble, from a painted canvas or a host? No, {227} doubtless; this
blood did once circulate in veins, then it has been shed, evaporated,
dried, the serum has turned into vapour, the globules into impalpable
dust, the whole has floated and whirled into the atmosphere, and has
then been attracted into the current of a specified electromagnetism.
The serum has again become liquid; it has taken up and imbibed anew the
globules which the astral light has coloured, and the blood flows.
Photography proves to us sufficiently that images are real
modifications of light. Now, there exists an accidental and fortuitous
photography which makes durable impression of mirages wandering in the
atmosphere, upon leaves of trees, in wood, and even in the heart of
stones: thus are formed those natural figures to which Gaffarel has
consecrated several pages in his book of "Curiosites inouies," those
stoned to which he attri butes an occult virtue, which he calls
"gamalies;" thus are traced those writings and drawings which so
greatly astonish the observers of fluidic phenomena. They are astral
photographs traced by the imagination of the mediums with or without
the assistance of the fluidic larvae.
The existence of these larvae has been demonstrated to us in a
preemptory manner by a rather curious experience. Several persons, in
order to test the magic power of the American Home, asked him to summon
up relations which they pretended they had lost, but, who, in reality,
had never existed. The spectres did not fail to reply to this appeal,
and the phenomena which habitually followed the evocations of the
medium were fully manifested.
This experience is sufficient of itself to convict of tiresome
credulity and of formal error those who believe that spirits {228}
intervene to produce these strange phenomena. That the dead may return,
it is above all necessary that they should have existed, and demons
would not so easily be the dupes of our mystifications.
Like all Catholics, we believe in the existence of spirits of darkness,
but we know also that the divine power has given them the darkness for
an eternal prison, and that the Redeemer saw Satan fall from heaven
like lightning. If the demons tempt us, it is by the voluntary
complicity of our passions, and it is not permitted to them to make
head against the empire of God, and by stupid and useless
manifestations to disturb the eternal order of Nature.
The diabolical signatures and characters, which are produced without
the knowledge of the medium, are evidently not proofs of a tacit or
formal pact between these degenerates and intelligences of the abyss.
These signs have served from the beginning to express astral vertigo,
and remain in a state of mirage in the reflections of the divulged
light. Nature also has its recollections, and sends to us the same
signs to correspond to the same ideas. In all this, there is nothing
either supernatural or infernal.
"How! do you want me to admit," said to us the Cure Charvoz, the first
vicar of Vintras, "that Satan dares to impress his hideous stigmata
upon consecrated materials, which have become the actual body of Jesus
Christ?" We declared immediately, that it was equally impossible for us
to pronounce in favour of such a blasphemy; and yet, as we demonstrated
in our articles in the "Estafette," the signs printed in bleeding
characters upon the hosts of Vintras, regularly consecrated by Charvoz,
were those which, in {229} Black Magic, are absolutely recognized for
the signatures of demons.
Astral writings are often ridiculous or obscene. The pretended spirits,
when questioned on the greater mysteries of Nature, often reply by that
coarse word which became, so they say, heroic on one occasion, in the
military mouth of Cambronne. The drawings which pencils will trace if
left to their own devices very often reproduce shapeless phalli, such
as the anaemic hooligan, as one might picturesquely call him, sketches
on the hoardings as he whistles, a further proof of our hypothesis,
that wit in no way presides at those manifestations, and that it would
be above all sovereignly absurd to recognize in them the intervention
of spirits released from the bondage of matter.
The Jesuit, Paul Saufidius, who has written on the manners and customs
of the Japanese, tells us a very remarkable story. A troop of Japanese
pilgrims one day, as they were traversing a desert, saw coming toward
them a band of spectres whose number was equal to that of the pilgrims,
and which walked at the same pace. These spectres, at first without
shape, and like larvae, took on as they approached all the appearance
of the human body. Soon they met the pilgrims, and mingled with them,
gliding silently between their ranks. Then the Japanese saw themselves
double, each phantom having become the perfect image and, as it were,
the mirage of each pilgrim. The Japanese were afraid, and prostrated
themselves, and the bonze who was conducting them began to pray for
them with great contortions and great cries. When the pilgrims rose up
again, the phantoms had disappeared, and the troop of devotees was able
to continue {230} its path in peace. This phenomenon, whose truth we do
not doubt, presents the double characters of a mirage, and of a sudden
projection of astral larvae, occasioned by the heat of the atmosphere,
and the fanatical exhaustion of the pilgrims.
Dr. Brierre de Boismont, in his curious treatise, "Trate des
hallucinations," tells us that a man, perfectly sane, who had never had
visions, was tormented one morning by a terrible nightmare: he saw in
his room a mysterious ape horrible to behold, who gnashed his teeth
upon him, and gave himself over to the most hideous contortions. He
woke with a start, it was already day; he jumped from his bed, and was
frozen with terror on seeing, really present, the frightful object of
his dream. The monkey was there, the exact image of the monkey of the
nightmare, equally absurd, equally terrible, even making the same
grimaces. He could not believe his eyes; he remained nearly half an
hour motionless, observing this singular phenomenon, and asking himself
whether he was delirious or mad. Ultimately, he approached the phantasm
to touch it, and it vanished.
Cornelius Gemma, in his "Histore critique universelle," says that in
the year 454, in the island of Candia, the phantom of Moses appeared to
some Jews on the sea-side; on his forehead he had luminous horns, in
his hand was his blasting rod; and he invited them to follow him,
showing them with his finger the horizon in the direction of the Holy
Land. The news of this prodigy spread abroad, and the Israelites rushed
towards the shore in a mob. All saw, or pretended to see, the
marvellous apparition: they were, in number, twenty thousand, according
to the chronicler, whom we suspect to be slightly exaggerating in this
respect. Immediately heads {231} grow hot, and imaginations wild; they
believe in a miracle more startling than was of old the passage of the
Red Sea. The Jews form in a close column, and run towards the sea; the
rear ranks push the front ranks frantically: they think they see the
pretended Mosses walk upon the water. A shocking disaster resulted:
almost all that multitude was drowned, and the hallucination was only
extinguished with the life of the greater number of those unhappy
visionaries.
Human thought creates what it imagines; the phantoms of superstition
project their deformities on the astral light, and live upon the same
terrors which give them birth. That black giant which reaches its wings
from east to west to hide the light from the world, that monster who
devours souls, that frightful divinity of ignorance and fear --- in a
word, the devil, --- is still, for a great multitude of children of all
ages, a frightful reality. In our "Dogme et rituel de la haute magie"
we represented him as the shadow of God, and in saying that, we still
hid the half of our thought: God is light without shadow. The devil is
only the shadow of the phantom of God!
The phantom of God! that last idol of the earth; that anthropomorphic
spectre which maliciously makes himself invisible; that finite
personification of the infinite; that invisible whom one cannot see
without dying --- without dying at least to intelligence and to reason,
since in order to see the invisible, one must be mad; the phantom of
Him who has no body; the confused form of Him who is without form and
without limit; it is in "that" that, without knowing it, the greater
number of believers believe. He who "is" essentially, purely,
spiritually, without being either absolute being, or an abstract {232}
being, or the collection of beings, the intellectual infinite in a
word, is so difficult to imagine! Besides, every imagination makes its
creator an idolater; he is obliged to believe in it, and worship it.
Our spirit should be silent before Him, and our heart alone has the
right to give Him a name: Our Father!
{233}


BOOK II
MAGICAL MYSTERIES

CHAPTER I
THEORY OF THE WILL
HUMAN life and its innumerable difficulties have for object, in the
ordination of eternal wisdom, the education of the will of man.
The dignity of man consists in doing what he will, and in willing the
good, in conformity with the knowledge of truth.
   The good in conformity with the true, is the just.
   Justice is the practice of reason.
   Reason is the work of reality.
   Reality is the science of truth.
   Truth is idea identical with being.
   Man arrives at the absolute idea of being by two roads, experience
   and hypothesis.
Hypothesis is probable when it is necessitated by the teachings of
experience; it is improbable or absurd when it is rejected by this
teaching.
Experience is science, and hypothesis is faith.
True science necessarily admits faith; true faith necessarily reckons
with science.
Pascal blasphemed against science, when he said that by reason man
could not arrive at the knowledge of any truth. {234}
In fact, Pascal died mad.
But Voltaire blasphemed no less against science, when he declare that
every hypothesis of faith was absurd, and admitted for the rule of
reason only the witness of the senses.
Moreover, the last word of Voltaire was this contradictory formula:
"GOD AND LIBERTY."
God! that is to say, a Supreme Master, excludes every idea of liberty,
as the school of Voltaire understood it.
And Liberty, by which is meant an absolute independence of any master,
which excludes all idea of God.
The word GOD expresses the supreme personification of law, and by
consequence, of duty; and if by the word LIBERTY, you are willing to
accept our interpretation, THE RIGHT OF DOING ONES DUTY, we in our
turn will take it for a motto, and we shall repeat, without
contradiction and without error: "GOD AND LIBERTY."
As there is no liberty for man but in the order which results from the
true and the good, one may say that the conquest of liberty is the
great work of the human soul. Man, by freeing himself from his evil
passions and their slavery, creates himself, as it were, a second time.
Nature made him living and suffering; he makes himself happy and
immortal; he thus becomes the representative of divinity upon earth,
and (relatively) exercises its almighty power.
AXIOM I
Nothing resists the will of man, when he knows the truth, and wills the
good. {235}
AXIOM II
To will evil, is to will death. A perverse will is a beginning of
suicide.
AXIOM III
To will good with violence, is to will evil, for violence produces
disorder, and disorder produces evil.
AXIOM IV
One can, and one should, accept evil as the means of good; but one must
never will it or do it, otherwise one would destroy with one hand what
one builds with the other. Good faith never justifies bad means; it
corrects them when one undergoes them, and condemns them when one takes
them.
AXIOM V
To have the right to possess always, one must will patiently and long.
AXIOM VI
To pass ones life in willing that it is impossible to possess always,
is to abdicate life and accept the eternity of death.
AXIOM VII
The more obstacles the will surmounts, the stronger it is. It is for
this reason that Christ glorified poverty and sorrow.
AXIOM VIII
When the will is vowed to the absurd, it is reproved by eternal reason.
AXIOM IX
The will of the just man is the will of God himself, and the law of
Nature. {236}
AXIOM X
It is by the will that the intelligence sees. If the will is healthy,
the sight is just. God said: "Let there be light!" and light is; the
will says, "Let the world be as I will to see it!" and the intelligence
sees it as the will has willed. This is the meaning of the word, "So be
it,"<> which confirms acts of faith.
AXIOM XI
When one creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the
world, and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare
with ones blood, ones life, ones intelligence, and ones reason,
without ever satisfying them.
AXIOM XII
To affirm and to will what ought to be is to create; to affirm and will
what ought not to be, is to destroy.
AXIOM XIII
Light<---
TRANS.>> is an electric fire put by Nature at the service of the will;
it lights those who know how to use it, it burns those who abuse it.
AXIOM XIV
The empire of the world is the empire of the light.<
special "light" spoken of previously. --- TRANS.>>
AXIOM XV
Great intellects whose wills are badly balanced are like comets which
are aborted suns.
AXIOM XVI
To do nothing is as fatal as to do evil, but it is more cowardly. The
most unpardonable of mortal sins is inertia. {237}
AXIOM XVII
To suffer is to work. A great sorrow suffered is a progress
accomplished. Those who suffer much live more than those who do not
suffer.
AXIOM XVIII
Voluntary death from devotion is not suicide; it is the apotheosis of
the will.
AXIOM XIX
Fear is nothing but idleness of the will, and for that reason public
opinion scourges cowards.
AXIOM XX
Succeed in not fearing the lion, and the lion will fear you. Say to
sorrow: "I will that you be a pleasure, more even than a pleasure, a
happiness."
AXIOM XXI
A chain of iron is easier to break than a chain of flowers.
AXIOM XXII
Before saying that a man is happy or unhappy, find out what the
direction of his will has made of him: Tiberius died every day at
Capri, while Jesus proved his immortality and even his divinity on
Calvary and upon the Cross.
{238}


CHAPTER II
THE POWER OF THE WORD
It is the word which creates forms; and forms in their turn react upon
the word, in order to modify it and complete it.
   Every word of truth is a beginning of an act of justice.
   One asks if man may sometimes be necessarily driven to evil. Yes,
   when his judgment is false, and consequently his word unjust.
   But one is responsible for a false judgment as for a bad action.
   What falsifies the judgment is selfishness and its unjust vanities.
The unjust word, unable to realize itself by creation, realizes itself
by destruction. It must either slay or be slain.
If it were able to remain without action, it would be the greatest of
all disorders, an abiding blasphemy against truth.
Such is that idle word of which Christ has said that one will give
account at the Day of Judgment. A jesting word, a comicality which
"recreates" and causes laughter, is not an idle word.
The beauty of the word is a splendour of truth. A true word in always
beautiful, a beautiful word is always true.
For this reason works of art are always holy when they are beautiful.
{239}
What does it matter to me that Anacreon should sing of Bathyllus, if in
his verse I hear the notes of that divine harmony which is the eternal
hymn of beauty? Poetry is pure as the Sun: it spreads its veil of light
over the errors of humanity. Woe to him who would lift the veil in
order to perceive things ugly!
The Council of Trent decided that it was permissible for wise and
prudent persons to read the books of the ancients, even those which
were obscene, on account of the beauty of the form. A statue of Nero or
of Heliogabalus made like a masterpiece of Phidias, would it not be an
absolutely beautiful and absolutely good work? --- and would not he
deserve the execration of the whole world who would propose to break it
because it was the representation of a monster?
Scandalous statues are those which are badly sculptured, and the Venus
of Milo would be desecrated if one placed her beside some of the
Virgins which they dare to exhibit in certain churches.
One realizes evil in books of morality ill-written far more than in the
poetry of Catullus or the ingenious Allegories of Apuleius.
There are no bad books, except those which are badly conceived and
badly executed.
Every word of beauty is a word of truth. It is a light crystallized in
speech.
But in order that the most brilliant light may be produced and made
visible, a shadow is necessary; and the creative word, that it may
become efficacious, needs contradictions. It must submit to the ordeal
of negation, of sarcasm, and then to that more cruel yet, of
indifference and forgetfulness. {240} The Master said: "If a corn of
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit."
Affirmation and negation must, then, marry each other, and from their
union will be born the practical truth, the real and progressive word.
It is necessity which should constrain the workmen to choose for the
corner-stone that which they had at first despised and rejected. Let
contradiction, then, never discourage men of initiative! Earth is
necessary for the ploughshare, and the earth resists because it is in
labour. It defends itself like all virgins; it conceives and brings
forth slowly like all mothers. You, then, who wish to sow a new plant
in the field of intelligence, understand and respect the modesties and
reluctances of limited experience and slow-moving reason.
When a new word comes into the world, it needs swaddling clothes and
bandages; genius brought it forth, but it is for experience to nourish
it. Do not fear that it will die of neglect! Oblivion is for it a
favourable time of rest, and contradictions help it to grow. When a sun
bursts forth in space it creates worlds or attracts them to itself. A
single spark of fixed light promises a universe to space.
All magic is in a word, and that word pronounced qabalistically is
stronger than all the powers of Heaven, Earth and Hell. With the name
of "Jod he vau he," one commands Nature: kingdoms are conquered in the
name of Adonai, and the occult forces which compose the empire of
Hermes are one and all obedient to him who knows how to pronounce duly
the incommunicable name of Agla.
In order to pronounce duly the great words of the Qabalah, {241} one
must pronounce them with a complete intelligence, with a will that
nothing checks, an activity that nothing daunts. In magic, to have said
is to have done; the word begins with letters, it ends with acts. One
does not really will a thing unless one wills it with all ones heart,
to the point of breaking for it ones dearest affections; and with all
ones forces, to the point of risking ones health, ones fortune, and
ones life.
It is by absolute devotion that faith proves itself and constitutes
itself. But the man armed with such a faith will be able to move
mountains.
The most fatal enemy of our souls is idleness. Inertia intoxicates us
and sends us to sleep; but the sleep of inertia is corruption and
death. The faculties of the human soul are like the waves of the ocean.
To keep them sweet, they need the salt and bitterness of tears: they
need the whirlwinds of Heaven: they need to be shaken by the storm.
When, instead of marching upon the path of progress, we wish to have
ourselves carried, we are sleeping in the arms of death. It is to us
that it is spoken, as to the paralytic man in the Gospel, "Take up thy
bed and walk!" It is for us to carry death away, to plunge it into
life.
Consider the magnificent and terrible metaphor of St. John; Hell is a
sleeping fire. It is a life without activity and without progress; it
is sulphur in stagnation: "stagnum ignis et sulphuris."
The sleeping life is like the idle word, and it is of that that men
will have to give an account in the Day of Judgment.
Intelligence speaks, and matter stirs. It will not rest until it has
taken the form given to it by the word. Behold the Christian word, how
for these nineteen centuries it has put {242} the world to work! What
battles of giants! How many errors set forth and re butted! How much
deceived and irritated Christianity lies at the bottom of
Protestantism, from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth! Human
egotism, in despair at its defeats, has whipped up all its stupidities
in turn. They have re-clothed the Saviour of the world with every rag
and with every mocking purple. After Jesus the Inquisitor they have
invented the "sans-culotte" Jesus! Measure if you can all the tears and
all the blood that have flowed; calculate audaciously all that will yet
be shed before the arrival of the Messianic reign of the Man-God who
shall submit at once all passions to powers and all powers to justice.
THY KINGDOM COME! For nigh on nineteen hundred years, over the whole
surface of the earth, this has been the cry of seven hundred million
throats, and the Israelites yet await the Messiah! He said that he
would come, and come he will. He came to die, and he has promised to
return to live.
HEAVEN IS THE HARMONY OF GENEROUS SENTIMENTS.
HELL IS THE CONFLICT OF COWARDLY INSTINCTS.
When humanity, by dint of bloody and dolorous experience, has truly
understood this double truth, it will abjure the Hell of selfishness to
enter into the Heaven of devotion and of Christian charity.
The lyre of Orpheus civilized savage Greece, and the lyre of Amphion
built Thebes the Mysterious, because harmony is truth. The whole of
Nature is harmony. But the Gospel is not a lyre: it is the book of the
eternal principles which should and will regulate all the lyres and all
the living harmonies of the universe. {243}
While the world does not understand these three words: Truth, Reason,
Justice, and these: Duty, Hierarchy, Society, the revolutionary motto,
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," will be nothing but a threefold lie.

CHAPTER III
MYSTERIOUS INFLUENCES
NO middle course is possible. Every man is either good or bad. The
indifferent, the lukewarm are not good; they are consequently bad, and
the worst of all the bad, for they are imbecile and cowardly. The
battle of life is like a civil war; those who remain neutral betray
both parties alike, and renounce the right to be numbered among the
children of the fatherland.
We all of us brea the in the life of others, and we brea the upon them in
some sort a part of our own existence. Good and intelligent men are,
unknown to themselves, the doctors of humanity; foolish and wicked men
are public poisoners.
There are people in whose company one feel refreshed. Look at that
young society woman! She chatters, she laughs, she dresses like
everybody else; why, then, is everything in her better and more
perfect? Nothing is more natural than her manner, nothing franker and
more nobly free than her conversation. Near her everything should be at
its ease, except bad sentiments, but near her they are impossible. She
does not seek hearts, but draws them to herself and lifts them up. She
does not intoxicate, she {244} enchants. Her whole personality preaches
a perfection more amiable than virtue itself. She is more gracious than
grace, her acts are easy and inimitable, like fine music and poetry. It
is of her that a charming woman, too friendly to be her rival, said
after a ball: "I thought I saw the Holy Bible frolicking."
Now look upon the other side of the sheet! See this other woman who
affects the most rigid devotion, and would be scandalized if she heard
the angels sing; but her talk is malevolent, her glance haughty and
contemptuous; when she speaks of virtue she makes vice lovable. For her
God is a jealous husband, and she makes a great merit of not deceiving
him. Her maxims are desolating, her actions due to vanity more than to
charity, and one might say after having met her at church: "I have seen
the devil at prayer."
On leaving the first, one feels ones self full of love for all that is
beautiful, good and generous. One is happy to have well said to her all
the noble things with which she has inspired you, and to have been
approved by her.<
century Germaine Stael, who died when Levi was seven.>> One says to
ones self that life is good, since God has bestowed it on such souls
as hers; one is full of courage and of hope. The other leaves you
weakened and baffled, or perhaps, what is worse, full of evil designs;
she makes you doubt of honour, piety and duty; in her presence one only
escapes from weariness by the door of evil desires. One has uttered
slander to please her, humiliated ones self to flatter her pride, one
remains discontented with her and with ones self.
The lively and certain sentiment of these diverse influences is proper
to well-balanced spirits and delicate consciences, {245} and it is
precisely that which the old ascetic writers called the power of
discerning spirits.
You are cruel consolers, said Job to his pretended friends. It is, in
fact, the vicious that afflict rather than console. They have a
prodigious tact for finding and choosing the most desperate banalities.
Are you weeping for a broken affection? How simple you are! they were
playing with you, they did not love you. You admit sorrowfully that
your child limps; in friendly fashion, they bid you remark that he is a
hunchback. If he coughs and that alarms you, they conjure you tenderly
to take great care of him, perhaps he is consumptive. Has you wife been
ill for a long time? Cheer up, she will die of it!
Hope and work is the message of Heaven to us by the voice of all good
souls. Despair and die, Hell cries to us in every word and movement,
even in all the friendly acts and caresses of imperfect or degraded
beings.
Whatever the reputation of any one may be, and whatever may be the
testimonies of friendship that that person may give you, if, on leaving
him, you feel yourself less well disposed and weaker, he is pernicious
for you: avoid him.
Our double magnetism produces in us two sorts of sympathies. We need to
absorb and to radiate turn by turn. Our heart loves contrasts, and
there are few women who have loved two men of genius in succession.
One finds peace through the protection which ones own weariness of
admiration gives; it is the law of equilibrium; but sometimes even
sublime natures are surprised in caprices of vulgarity. Man, said the
Abbe Gerbert, is the shadow of {246} a God in the body of a beast;
there are in him the friends of the angel and the flatterers of the
animal. The angel attracts us; but if we are not on our guard, it is
the beast that carries us away: it will even drag us fatally with it
when it is a question of beastliness; that is to say, of the
satisfactions of that life the nourisher of death, which, in the
language of beasts is called "real life." In religion, the Gospel is a
sure guide; it is not so in business, and there are a great many people
who, if they had to settle the temporal succession of Jesus Christ,
would more willingly come to an agreement with Judas Iscariot than with
St. Peter.
One admires probity, said Juvenal, and one leaves it to freeze to
death. If such and such a celebrated man, for example, had not
scandalously solicited wealth, would one ever have thought of endowing
his old muse? Who would have left him legacies?
Virtue has our admiration, our purse owes it nothing, that great lady
is rich enough without us. One would rather give to vice, it is so
poor!
"I do not like beggars, and I only give to the poor who are ashamed to
beg," said one day a man of wit. "But what do you give them since you
do not know them?" "I give them my admiration and my esteem, and I have
no need to know them to do that." "How is it that you need so much
money?" they asked another, "you have no children and no calls on you."
"I have my poor folk, and I cannot prevent myself from giving them a
great deal of money." "Make me acquainted with the, perhaps I will give
them something too." "Oh! you know some of them already, I have no
doubt. I have seven who cost me an enormous amount, and {247} an eighth
who costs more than the seven others. The seven are the seven deadly
sing; the eighth is gambling."
Another dialogue: ---
"Give me five francs, sir, I am dying of hunger." "Imbecile! you are
dying of hunger, and you want me to encourage you in so evil a course?
You are dying of hunger, and you have the impudence to admit it. You
wish to make me the accomplice of your incapacity, the abetter of your
suicide. You want to put a premium on wretchedness. For whom do you
take me? Do you think I am a rascal like yourself? ..."
And yet another: ---
"By the way, old fellow, could you lend me a thousand pounds? I want to
seduce an honest woman." "Ah! that is bad, but I can never refuse
anything to a friend. Here they are. When you have succeeded you might
give me her address." That is what is called in England, and elsewhere,
the manners of a gentleman.
"The man of honour who is out of work steals, and does not beg!"
replied, one day, Cartouche to a passer-by who asked alms of him. It is
as emphatic as the word which tradition associates with Cambronne, and
perhaps the famous thief and the great general both really replied in
the same manner.
It was that same Cartouche who offered, on another occasion, of his own
accord and without it being asked of him, twenty thousand pounds to a
bankrupt. One must act properly to ones brothers.
Mutual assistance is a law of nature. To aid those who are like
ourselves is to aid ourselves. But above mutual {248} assistance rises
a holier and greater law: it is universal assistance, it is charity.
We all admire and love Saint Vincent de Paul, but we have also a secret
weakness for the cleverness, the presence of mind, and, above all, the
audacity of Cartouche.
The avowed accomplices of our passions may disgust us by humiliating
us; at our own risk and peril our pride will teach us how to resist
them. But what is more dangerous for us than our hypocritical and
hidden accomplices? They follow us like sorrow, await us like the
abyss, surround us like infatuation. We excuse them in order to excuse
ourselves, defending them in order to defend ourselves, justifying them
in order to justify ourselves, and we submit to them finally because we
must, because we have not the strength to resist our inclinations,
because we lack the will to do so.
They have possessed themselves of our ascendant, as Paracelsus says,
and where they wish to lead us we shall go.
They are our bad angels. We know it in the depths of our consciousness;
but we put up with them, we have made ourselves their servants that
they also may be ours.
Our passions treated tenderly and flattered, have become
slave-mistresses; and those who serve our passions our valets, and our
masters.
We brea the out our thoughts and brea the in those of others imprinted in
the astral light which has become their electro-magnetic atmosphere:
and thus the companionship of the wicked is less fatal to the good than
that of vulgar, cowardly, and tepid beings. Strong antipathy warns us
easily, and saves us from the contact of gross vices; it is not thus
with disguised vices vices to a certain extend diluted {249} and become
almost lovable. An honest woman will experience nothing but disgust in
the society of a prostitute, but she has everything to fear from the
seductions of a coquette.
One knows that madness is contagious, but the mad are more particularly
dangerous when they are amiable and sympathetic. One enters little by
little into their circle of ideas, one ends by understanding their
exaggerations, while partaking their enthusiasm, one grows accustomed
to their logic that has lost its way, one ends by finding that they are
not as mad as one thought at first. Thence to believing that they alone
are right there is but one step. One likes them, one approves of them,
one is as mad as they are.
The affections are free and may be based on reason, but sympathies are
of fatalism, and very frequently unreasonable. They depend on the more
or less balanced attractions of the magnetic light, and act on men in
the same way as upon animals. One will stupidly take pleasure in the
society of a person in whom is nothing lovable, because one is
mysteriously attracted and dominated by him. And often enough, these
strange sympathies began by lively antipathies; the fluids repelled
each other at first, and subsequently became balanced.
The equilibrating speciality of the plastic medium of every person is
what Paracelsus calls his "ascendant," and he gives the name of
"flagum" to the particular reflection of the habitual ideas of each one
in the universal light.
One arrives at the knowledge of the "ascendant" of a person by the
sensitive divination of the "flagum," and by a persistent direction of
the will. One turns the active side of ones own ascendant towards the
passive side of the ascendant of {250} another when one wishes to take
hold of that other and dominate him.
The astral ascendant has been divined by other magi, who gave it the
name of "tourbillon" (vortex).
It is, say they, a current of specialized light, representing always
the same circle of images, and consequently determined and determining
impressions. These vortices exist for men as for stars. "The stars,"
said Paracelsus, "brea the out their luminous soul, and attract each
others radiation. The soul of the earth, prisoner of the fatal laws of
gravitation, frees itself by specializing itself, and passes through
the instinct of animals to arrive at the intelligence of man. The
active portion of this will is dumb, but it preserves in writing the
secrets of Nature. The free part can no longer read this fatal writing
without instantaneously losing its liberty. One does not pass from dumb
and vegetative contemplation to free vibrating thought without changing
ones surroundings and ones organs. Thence comes the forgetfulness
which accompanies birth, and the vague reminiscences of our sickly
intuitions, always analogous to the visions of our ecstasies and of our
dreams."
This revelation of that great master of occult medicine throws a fierce
light on all the phenomena of somnambulism and of divination. There
also, for whoever knows how to find it, is the true key of evocation,
and of communication with the fluidic soul of the earth.
Those persons whose dangerous influence makes itself felt by a single
touch are those who make part of a fluidic association, or who either
voluntarily or involuntarily make use of a current of astral light
which has gone astray. Those, {251} for example, who live in isolation,
deprived of all communication with humanity, and who are daily in
fluidic sympathy with animals gathered together in great number, as is
ordinarily the case with shepherds, are possessed of the demon whose
name is "legion;" in their turn they reign despotically over the fluid
souls of the flocks that are confided to their care: consequently their
good-will or ill-will makes their cattle prosper or die; and this
influence of animal sympathy can be exercised by them upon human
plastic mediums which are ill defended, owing either to a weak will or
a limited intelligence.
Thus are explained the bewitchments which are habitually made by
shepherds, and the still quite recent phenomena of the Presbytery of
Cideville.
Cideville is a little village of Normandy, where a few years ago were
produced phenomena like those which have since occurred under the
influence of Mr. Home. M. de Mirville has studied them carefully, and
M. Gougenet Desmousseaux has reprinted all the details in a book,
published in 1854, entitled "Moeurs et pratiques des demons." The most
remarkable thing in this latter author is that he seems to divine the
existence of the plastic medium or the fluidic body. "We have certainly
not two souls," said he, "but perhaps we have two bodies." Everything
that he says, in fact, would seem to prove this hypothesis. He saw a
shepherd whose fluidic form haunted a Presbytery, and who was wounded
at a distance by blows inflicted on his astral larva.
We shall here ask of MM. de Mirville and Gougenet Desmousseaux if they
take this shepherd for the devil, and if, far or near, the devil such
as they conceive him can be scratched {252} or wounded. At that time,
in Normandy, the magnetic illnesses of mediums were hardly known, and
this unhappy sleep- walker, who ought to have been cared for an cured,
was roughly treated and even beaten, not even in his fludic appearance,
but in his proper person, by the Vicar himself. That is, one must
agree, a singular kind of exorcism! If those violences really took
place, and if they may be imputed to a Churchman whom one considers,
and who may be, for all we know, very good and very respectable, let us
admit that such writers as MM. de Mirville and Gougenet Desmousseaux
make themselves not a little his accomplices!
The laws of physical life are inexorable, and in his animal nature man
is born a slave to fatality; it is by dint of struggles against his
instincts that he may win moral freedom. Two different existences are
then possible for us upon the earth; one fatal, the other free. The
fatal being is the toy or instrument of a force which he does not
direct. Now, when the instruments of fatality meet and collide, the
stronger breaks or carries away the weaker; truly emancipated beings
fear neither bewitchments nor mysterious influences.
You may reply that an encounter with Cain may be fatal for Abel.
Doubtless; but such a fatality is an advantage to the pure and holy
victim, it is only a misfortune for the assassin.
Just as among the righteous there is a great community of virtues and
merits, there is among the wicked an absolute solidarity of fatal
culpability and necessary chastisement. Crime resides in the tendencies
of the heart. Circumstances which are almost always independent of the
will are the only causes of the gravity of the acts. If fatality had
made Nero {253} a slave, he would have become an actor or a gladiator,
and would not have burned Rome: would it be to him that one should be
grateful for that?
Nero was the accomplice of the whole Roman people, and those who should
have prevented them incurred the whole responsibility for the frenzies
of this monster. Seneca, Burrhus, Thrasea, Corbulon, theirs is the real
guilt of that fearful reign; great men who were either selfish or
incapable! The only thing they knew was how to die.
If one of the bears of the Zoological Gardens escaped and devoured
several people, would one blame him or his keepers?
Whoever frees himself from the common errors of mankind is obliged to
pay a ransom proportional to the sum of these errors: Socrates pays for
Aneitus, and Jesus was obliged to suffer a torment whose terror was
equal to the whole treason of Judas.
Thus, by paying the debts of fatality, hard-won liberty purchases the
empire of the world; it is hers to bind and to unbind. God has put in
her hands the keys of Heaven and of Hell.
You men who abandon brutes to themselves wish them to devour you.
The rabble, slaves of fatality, can only enjoy liberty by absolute
obedience to the will of free men; they ought to work for those who are
responsible for them.
But when the brute governs brutes, when the blind leads the blind, when
the leader is as subject to fatality as the masses, what must one
expect? What but the most shocking catastrophes? In that we shall never
be disappointed.
By admitting the anarchical dogmas of 1789, Louis XVI {254} launched
the State upon a fatal slope. From that moment all the crimes of the
Revolution weighed upon him alone; he alone had failed in his duty.
Robespierre and Marat only did what they had to do. Girondins and
Montagnards killed each other in the workings of fatality, and their
violent deaths were so many necessary catastrophes; at that epoch there
was but one great and legitimate execution, really sacred, really
expiatory: that of the King. The principle of royalty would have fallen
if that too weak price had escaped. But a transaction between order and
disorder was impossible. One does not inherit from those whom one
murders; one robs them; and the Revolution rehabilitated Louis XVI by
assassinating him. After so many concessions, so many weaknesses, so
many unworthy abasements, that man, consecrated a second time by
misfortune, was able at least to say, as he walked to the scaffold:
"The Revolution is condemned, and I am always the King of France"!
To be just is to suffer for all those who are not just, but it is life:
to be wicked is to suffer for ones self without winning life; it is to
deceive ones self, to do evil, and to win eternal death.
To recapitulate: Fatal influences are those of death. Living influences
are those of life. According as we are weaker or stronger in life, we
attract or repel witchcraft. This occult power is only too real, but
intelligence and virtue will always find the means to avoid its
obsessions and its attacks. {255}



CHAPTER IV
MYSTERIES OF PERVERSITY
HUMAN equilibrium is composed of two attractions, one towards death,
the other towards life. Fatality is the vertigo which drags us to the
abyss; liberty is the reasonable effort which lifts us above the fatal
attractions of death. What is mortal sin? It is apostasy from our own
liberty; it is to abandon ourselves to the law of inertia. An unjust
act is a compact with injustice; now, every injustice is an abdication
of intelligence. We fall from that moment under the empire of force
whose reactions always crush everything which is unbalanced.
The love of evil and the formal adhesion of the will to injustice are
the last efforts of the expiring will. Man, whatever he may do, is more
than a brute, and he cannot abandon himself like a brute to fatality.
He must choose. He must love. The desperate soul that thinks itself in
love with death is still more alive than a soul without love. Activity
for evil can and should lead back a man to good, by counter-stroke and
by reaction. The true evil, that for which there is no remedy, is
inertia.<
or shells of evil. The first of these is associated with Malkuth,
simple material limitation, tiredness, inertia.>>
The abysses of grace correspond to the abysses of perversity. God has
often made saints of scoundrels; but He has never done anything with
the half- hearted and the cowardly.
Under penalty of reprobation, one must work, one must act. Nature,
moreover, sees to this, and if we will not march on with all our
courage towards life, she flings us with all {256} her forces towards
death. She drags those who will not walk.
A man whom one may call the great prophet of drunkards, Edgar Poe, that
sublime madman, that genius of lucid extravagance, has depicted with
terrifying reality the nightmares of perversity. ...
"I killed the old man because he squinted." "I did that because I ought
not to have done it."
There is the terrible antistrophe of Tertullians "Credo quia
absurdum."
To brave God and to insult Him, is a final act of faith.<
Crowleys "John St. John".>> "The dead praise thee not, O Lord," said
the Psalmist; and we might add if we dared: "The dead do not blaspheme
thee."
"O my son!" said a father as he leaned over the bed of his child who
had fallen into lethargy after a violent access of delirium: "insult me
again, beat me, bite me, I shall feel that you are still alive, but do
not rest for ever in the frightful silence of the tomb!"
A great crime always comes to protest against great lukewarmness. A
hundred thousand good priests, had their charity been more active,
might have prevented the crime of the wretch Verger. The Church has the
right to judge, condemn and punish an ecclesiastic who causes scandal;
but she has not the right to abandon him to the frenzies of despair and
the temptations of misery and hunger.
Nothing is so terrifying as nothingness, and if one could ever
formulate the conception of it, if it were possible to admit it, Hell
would be a thing to hope for.
This is why Nature itself seeks and imposes expiation as a remedy; that
is why chastisement is a chastening, as that {257} great Catholic Count
Joseph de Maistre so well understood; this is why the penalty of death
is a natural right, and will never disappear from human laws. The stain
of murder would be indelible if God did not justify the scaffold; the
divine power, abdicated by society and usurped by criminals, would
belong to them without dispute. Assassination would then become a
virtue when it exercised the reprisals of outraged nature. Private
vengeance would protest against the absence of public expiation, and
from the splinters of the broken sword of justice anarchy would forge
its daggers.
"If God did away with Hell, men would make another in order to defy
Him," said a good priest to us one day. He was right: and it is for
that reason that Hell is so anxious to be done away with. Emancipation!
is the cry of every vice. Emancipation of murder by the abolition of
the pain of death; emancipation of prostitution and infanticide by the
abolition of marriage; emancipation of idleness and rapine by the
abolition of property. ... So revolves the whirlwind of perversity
until it arrives at this supreme and secret formula: Emancipation of
death by the abolition of life!
It is by the victories of toil that one escapes from the fatalities of
sorrow. What we call death is but the eternal parturition of Nature.
Ceaselessly she re-absorbs and takes again to her breast all that is
not born of the spirit. Matter, in itself inert, can only exist by
virtue of perpetual motion, and spirit, naturally volatile, can only
endure by fixing itself. Emancipation from the laws of fatality by the
free adhesion of the spirit to the true and good, is what the Gospel
calls the spiritual birth; the re-absorption into the eternal bosom of
Nature is the second death. {258}
Unemancipated beings are drawn towards this second death by a fatal
gravitation; the one drags the other, as the divine Michel Angelo has
made us see so clearly in his great picture of the Last Judgment; they
are clinging and tenacious like drowning men, and free spirits must
struggle energetically against them, that their flight may not be
hindered by them, that they may not be pulled back to Hell.
This war is as ancient as the world; the Greeks figured it under the
symbols of Eros and Anteros, and the Hebrews by the antagonism of Cain
and Abel. It is the war of the Titans and the Gods. The two armies are
everywhere invisible, disciplined and always ready for attack or
counterattack. Simple-minded folk on both sides, astonished at the
instant and unanimous resistance that they meet, begin to believe in
vast plots cleverly organized, in hidden, all-powerful societies.
Eugene Sue invents Rodin;<--- TRANS.>> churchmen
talk of the Illuminati and of the Freemasons; Wronski dreams of his
bands of mystics, and there is nothing true and serious beneath all
that but the necessary struggle of order and disorder, of the instincts
and of thought; the result of that struggle is balance in progress, and
the devil always contri butes, despite himself, to the glory of St.
Michael.
Physical love is the most perverse of all fatal passions. It is the
anarchist of anarchists; it knows neither law, duty, truth nor justice.
It would make the maiden walk over the corpses of her parents. It is an
irrepressible intoxication; a furious madness. It is the vertigo of
fatality seeking new victims; the cannibal drunkenness of Saturn who
wishes to {259} become a father in order that he may have more children
to devour. To conquer love is to triumph over the whole of Nature. To
submit it to justice is to rehabilitate life by devoting it to
immortality; thus the greatest works of the Christian revelation are
the creation of voluntary virginity and the sanctification of marriage.
While love is nothing but a desire and an enjoyment, it is mortal. In
order to make itself eternal it must become a sacrifice, for then it
becomes a power and a virtue.<
THEORY AND PRACTICE, chapter 12.>> It is the struggle of Eros and
Anteros which produces the equilibrium of the world.
Everything that over-excites sensibility leads to depravity and crime.
Tears call for blood. It is with great emotions as with strong drink;
to use them habitually is to abuse them. Now, every abuse of the
emotions perverts the moral sense; one seeks them for their own sakes;
one sacrifices everything in order to procure them for ones self. A
romantic woman will easily become an Old Bailey heroine. She may even
arrive at the deplorable and irreparable absurdity of killing herself
in order to admire herself, and pity herself, in seeing herself die!
Romantic habits lead women to hysteria and men to melancholia. Manfred,
Rene, Lelia are types of perversity only the more profound in that they
argue on behalf of their unhealthy pride, and make poems of their
dementia. One asks ones self with terror what monster might be born
from the coupling of Manfred and Lelia!
The loss of the moral sense is a true insanity; the man who does not,
first of all, obey justice no longer belongs to himself; he walks
without a light in the night of his existence; {260} he shakes like one
in a dream, a prey to the nightmare of his passions.
The impetuous currents of instinctive life and the feeble resistances
of the will form an antagonism so distinct that the qabalists
hypothesized the super-foetation of souls; that is to say, they
believed in the presence in one body of several souls who dispute it
with each other and often seek to destroy it. Very much as the
shipwrecked sailors of the "Medusa," when they were disputing the
possession of the too small raft, sought to sink it.
It is certain that, in making ones self the servant of any current
whatever, of instincts or even of ideas, one gives up ones
personality, and becomes the slave of that multitudinous spirit whom
the Gospel calls "legion." Artists know this well enough. Their
frequent evocations of the universal light enervate them. They become
"mediums," that is to say, sick men. The more success magnifies them in
public opinion, the more their personality diminishes. They become
crotchety, envious, wrathful. They do not admit that any merit, even in
a different sphere, can be placed besides theirs; and, having become
unjust, they dispense even with politeness. To escape this fatality,
really great men isolate themselves from all comradeship, knowing it to
be death to liberty. They save themselves by a proud unpopularity from
the contamination of the vile multitude. If Balzac had been during his
life a man of a clique or of a party, he would not have remained after
his death the great and universal genius of our epoch.
The light illuminates neither things insensible nor closed eyes, or at
least it only illuminates them for the profit of those who see. The
word of Genesis, "Let there be light!" {261} is the cry of victory with
which intelligence triumphs over darkness. This word is sublime in
effect because it expresses simply the greatest and most marvellous
thing in the world: the creation of intelligence by itself, when,
calling its powers together, balancing its faculties, it says: I wish
to immortalize myself with the sight of the eternal truth. Let there be
light! and there is light. Light, eternal as God, begins every day for
all eyes that are open to see it. Truth will be eternally the invention
and the creation of genius; it cries: Let there be light! and genius
itself is, because light is. Genius is immortal because it understands
that light is eternal. Genius contemplates truth as its work because it
is the victor of light, and immortality is the triumph of light because
it will be the recompense and crown of genius.
But all spirits do not see with justness, because all hearts do not
will with justice. There are souls for whom the true light seems to
have no right to be. They content themselves with phosphorescent
visions, abortions of light, hallucinations of thought; and, loving
these phantoms, fear the day which will put them to flight, because
they feel that, the day not being made for their eyes, they would fall
back into a deeper darkness. It is thus that fools first fear, then
calumniate, insult, pursue and condemn the sages. One must pity them,
and pardon them, for they know not what they do.
True light rests and satisfies the soul; hallucination, on the
contrary, tires it and worries it. The satisfactions of madness are
like those gastronomic dreams of hungry men which sharpen their hunger
without ever satisfying it. Thence are born irritations and troubles,
discouragements and despairs. --- Life is always a lie to us, say the
disciples of {262} Werther, and therefore we wish to die! Poor
children, it is not death that you need, it is life. Since you have
been in the world you have died every day; is it from the cruel
pleasure of annihilation that you would demand a remedy for the
annihilation of your pleasure? No, life has never deceived you, you
have not yet lived. What you have been taking for life is but the
hallucinations and the dreams of the first slumber of death!
All great criminals have hallucinated themselves on purpose; and those
who hallucinate themselves on purpose may be fatally led to become
great criminals. Our personal light specialized, brought forth,
determined by our own overmastering affection, is the germ of our
paradise or of our Hell. Each one of us (in a sense) conceives, bears,
and nourishes his good or evil angel. The conception of truth gives
birth in us to the good genius; intentional untruth hatches and brings
up nightmares and phantoms. Everyone must nourish his children; and our
life consumes itself for the sake of our thoughts. Happy are those who
find again immortality in the creations of their soul! Woe unto them
who wear themselves out to nourish falsehood and to fatten death! for
every one will reap the harvest of his own sowing.
There are some unquiet and tormented creature whose influence is
disturbing and whose conversation is fatal. In their presence one feels
ones self irritated, and one leaves their presence angry; yet, by a
secret perversity, one looks for them, in order to experience the
disturbance and enjoy the malevolent emotions which they give us. Such
persons suffer from the contagious maladies of the spirit of
perversity.
The spirit of perversity has always for its secret motive {263} the
thirst of destruction, and its final aim is suicide. The murderer of
Elisabide, on his own confession, not only felt the savage need of
killing his relations and friends, but he even wished, had it been
possible --- he said it in so many words at his trial --- "to burst the
globe like a cooked chestnut." Lacenaire, who spent his days in

plotting murders, in order to have the means of passing his nights in
ignoble orgies or in the excitement of gambling, boasted aloud that he
had lived. He called that living, and he sang a hymn to the guillotine,
which he called his beautiful betrothed, and the world was full of
imbeciles who admired the wretch! Alfred de Musset, before
extinguishing himself in drunkenness, wasted one of the finest talents
of his century in songs of cold irony and of universal disgust. The
unhappy man had been bewitched by the breath of a profoundly perverse
woman, who, after having killed him, crouched like a ghoul upon his
body and tore his winding sheet. We asked one day, of a young writer of
this school, what his literature proved. It proves, he replied frankly
and simply, that one must despair and die. What apostleship, and what a
doctrine! But these are the necessary and regular conclusions of the
spirit of perversity; to aspire ceaselessly to suicide, to calumniate
life and nature, to invoke death every day without being able to die.
This is eternal Hell, it is the punishment of Satan, that mythological
incarnation of the spirit of perversity; the true translation into
French of the Greek word "Diabolos," or devil, is "le pervers --- the
perverse."
Here is a mystery which debauchees do not suspect. It is this: one
cannot enjoy even the material pleasures of life but by virtue of the
moral sense. Pleasure is the music of the {264} interior harmonies; the
senses are only its instruments, instruments which sound false in
contact with a degraded soul. The wicked can feel nothing, because they
can love nothing: in order to love one must be good. Consequently for
them everything is empty, and it seems to them that Nature is impotent,
because they are so themselves; they doubt everything because they know
nothing; they blaspheme everything because they taste nothing; they
caress in order to degrade; they drink in order to get drunk; they
sleep in order to forget; they wake in order to endure mortal boredom:
thus will live, or rather thus will die, every day he who frees himself
from every law and every duty in order to make himself the slave of his
passions. The world, and eternity itself, become useless to him who
makes himself useless to the world and to eternity.
Our will, by acting directly upon our plastic medium, that is to say,
upon the portion of astral life which is specialized in us, and which
serves us for the assimilation and configuration of the elements
necessary to our existence; our will, just or unjust, harmonious or
perverse, shapes the medium in its own image and gives it beauty in
conformity with what attracts us. Thus moral monstrosity produces
physical ugliness; for the astral medium, that interior architect of
our bodily edifice, modifies it ceaselessly according to our real or
factitious needs. It enlarges the belly and the jaws of the greedy,
thins the lips of the miser, makes the glances of impure women
shameless, and those of the envious and malicious venomous. When
selfishness has prevailed in the soul, the look becomes cold, the
features hard: the harmony of form disappears, and according to the
absorption or radiant speciality of this {265} selfishness, the limbs
dry up or become encumbered with fat. Nature, in making of our body the
portrait of our soul, guarantees its resemblance for ever, and
tirelessly retouches it. You pretty women who are not good, be sure
that you will not long remain beautiful. Beauty is the loan which
Nature makes to virtue. If virtue is not ready when it falls due, the
lender will pitilessly take back Her capital.
Perversity, by modifying the organism whose equilibrium it destroys,
creates at the same time a fatality of needs which urges it to its own
destruction, to its death. The less the perverse man enjoys, the more
thirsty of enjoyment he is. Wine is like water for the drunkard, gold
melts in the hands of the gambler; Messalina tires herself out without
being satiated. The pleasure which escapes them changes itself for them
into a long irritation and desire. The more murderous are their
excesses, the more it seems to them that supreme happiness is at hand.
... One more bumper of strong drink, one more spasm, one more violence
done to Nature... Ah! at last, here is pleasure; here is life ... and
their desire, in the paroxysm of its insatiable hunger, extinguishes
itself for ever in death.

{266}



FOURTH PART
THE GREAT PRACTICAL SECRETS OR THE REALIZATION
OF SCIENCE
INTRODUCTION
THE lofty sciences of the Qabalah and of Magic promise man an
exceptional, real, effective, efficient power, and one should regard
them as false and vain if they do not give it.
Judge the teachers by their works, said the supreme Master. This rule
of judgment is infallible.
If you wish me to believe in what you know, show me what you do.
God, in order to exalt man to moral emancipation, hides Himself from
him and abandons to him, after a fashion, the government of the world.
He leaves Himself to be guessed by the grandeurs and harmonies of
nature, so that man may progressively make himself perfect by ever
exalting the idea that he makes for himself of its author.
Man knows God only by the names which he gives to that Being of beings,
and does not distinguish Him but by the images of Him which he
endeavours to trace. He is then in a manner the creator of Him Who has
created him. He believes himself the mirror of God, and by indefinitely
enlarging his own mirage, he thinks that he may be able to sketch in
infinite space the shadow of Him Who is without body, without shadow,
and without space. {267}
TO CREATE GOD, TO CREATE ONES SELF, TO MAKE ONES SELF INDEPENDENT,
IMMORTAL AND WITHOUT SUFFERING: there certainly is a programme more
daring than the dream of Prometheus. Its expression is bold to the
point of impiety, its thought ambitious to the point of madness. Well,
this programme is only paradoxical in its form, which lends itself to a
false and sacrilegious interpretation. In one sense it is perfectly
reasonable, and the science of the adepts promises to realize it, and
to accomplish it in perfection.
Man, in effect, creates for himself a God corresponding to his own
intelligence and his own goodness; he cannot raise his ideal higher
than his moral development permits him to do. The God whom he adores is
always an enlargement of his own reflection. To conceive the absolute
of goodness and justice is to be ones self exceeding just and good.
The moral qualities of the spirit are riches, and the greatest of all
riches. One must acquire them by strife and toil. One may bring this
objection, the inequality of aptitudes; some children are born with
organisms nearer to perfection. But we ought to believe that such
organisms result from a more advanced work of Nature, and the children
who are endowed with them have acquired them, if not by their own
efforts, at least by the consolidated works of the human beings to whom
their existence is bound. It is a secret of Nature, and Nature does
nothing by chance; the possession of more developed intellectual
faculties, like that of money and land, constitutes an indefeasible
right of transmission and inheritance.
Yes, man is called to complete the work of his creator, and every
instant employed by him to improve himself or to {268} destroy himself,
is decisive for all eternity. It is by the conquest of an intelligence
eternally clear and of a will eternally just, that he constitutes
himself as living for eternal life, since nothing survives injustice
and error but the penalty of their disorder. To understand good is to
will it, and on the plane of justice to will is to do. For this reason
the Gospel tells us that men will be judged according to their works.
Our works make us so much what we are, that our body itself, as we have
said, receives the modification, and sometimes the complete change, of
its form from our habits.
A form conquered, or submitted to, becomes a providence, or a fatality,
for all ones existence. Those strange figures which the Egyptians gave
to the human symbols of divinity represent the fatal forms. Typhon has
a crocodiles head. He is condemned to eat ceaselessly in order to fill
his hippopotamus belly. Thus he is devoted, by his greed and his
ugliness, to eternal destruction.
Man can kill or vivify his faculties by negligence or by abuse. He can
create for himself new faculties by the good use of those which he has
received from Nature. People often say that the affections will not be
commanded, that faith is not possible for all, that one does not
re-make ones own character. All these assertions are true only for the
idle or the perverse. One can make ones self faithful, pious, loving,
devoted, when one wishes sincerely to be so. One can give to ones
spirit the calm of justness, as to ones will the almighty power of
justice. Once can reign in Heaven by virtue of faith, on earth by
virtue of science. The man who knows how to comm and himself is king of
all Nature. {269}
We are going to state forthwith, in this last book, by what means the
true initiates have made themselves the masters of life, how they have
overcome sorrow and death; how they work upon themselves and others the
transformation of Proteus; how they exercise the divining power of
Apollonius; how they make the gold of Raymond Lully and of Flamel; how
in order to renew their youth they possess the secrets of Postel the
Re-arisen, and those alleged to have been in the keeping of Cagliostro.
In short, we are going to speak the last word of magic.

CHAPTER I
OF TRANSFORMATION --- THE WAND OF CIRCE --- THE BATH OF MEDEA --- MAGIC
OVERCOME BY ITS OWN WEAPONS --- THE GREAT ARCANUM OF THE JESUITS AND
THE SECRET OF THEIR POWER.

THE Bible tells us that King Nebuchadnezzar, at the highest point of

his power and his pride, was suddenly changed into a beast.
He fled into savage places, began to eat grass, let his beard and hair
grow, as well as his nails, and remained in this state for seven years.
In our "Dogme et rituel de la haute magie," we have said what we think
of the mysteries of lycanthropy, or the metamorphosis of men into
werewolves.
Everyone knows the fable of Circe and understands its allegory. {270}
The fatal ascendant of one person on another is the true wand of Circe.
One knows that almost all human physiognomies bear a resemblance to one
animal or another, that is to say, the "signature" of a specialized
instinct.
Now, instincts are balanced by contrary instincts, and dominated by
instincts stronger than those.
In order to dominate sheep, the dog plays upon their fear of wolves.
If you are a dog, and you want a pretty little cat to love you, you
have only one means to take: to metamorphose yourself into a cat.
But how! By observation, imitation and imagination. We think that our
figurative language will be understood for once, and we recommend this
revelation to all who wish to magnetize: it is the deepest of all the
secrets of their art.
Here is the formula in technical terms:
"To polarize ones own animal light, in equilibrated antagonism with
the contrary pole."
Or:
To concentrate in ones self the special qualities of absorption in
order to direct their rays towards an absorbing focus, and vice versa.
This government of our magnetic polarization may be done by the
assistance of the animal forms of which we have spoken; they will serve
to fix the imagination.
Let us give an example:
You wish to act magnetically upon a person polarized like yourself,
which, if you are a magnetizer, you will divine at the first contact:
only that person is a little less strong that you {271} are, a mouse,
while you are a rat. Make yourself a cat, and you will capture it.
In one of the admirable stories which, though he did not invent it, he
has told better than anybody, Perrault puts upon the stage a cat, which
cunningly induces an ogre to change himself into a mouse, and the thing
is no sooner done, than the mouse is crunched by the cat. The "Tales of
Mother Goose," like the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius, are perhaps true
magical legends, and hide beneath the cloak of childish fairy tales the
formidable secrets of science.
It is a matter of common knowledge that magnetizers give to pure water
the properties and taste of wine, liqueurs and every conceivable drug,
merely by the laying-on of hands, that is to say, by their will
expressed in a sign.
One knows, too, that those who tame fierce animals conquer lions by
making themselves mentally and magnetically stronger and fiercer than
lions.
Jules Gerard, the intrepid hunter of the African lion, would be
devoured if he were afraid. But, in order not to be afraid of a lion,
one must make ones self stronger and more savage than the animal
itself by an effort of imagination and of will. One must say to ones
self: It is I who am the lion, and in my presence this animal is only a
dog who ought to tremble before me.
Fourier imagined anti-lions; Jules Gerard has realized that chimera of
the phanlasterian<
"Utopia." His social unit was the "phalanstere." --- TRANS.>> dreamer.
But, one will say, in order not to fear lions, it is enough to be a man
of courage and well armed. {272}
No, that is not enough. One must know ones self by heart, so to speak,
to be able to calculate the leaps of the animal, divining its
stratagems, avoiding its claws, foreseeing its movements, to be in a
word past-master in lioncraft, as the excellent La Fontaine might have
said.
Animals are the living symbols of the instincts and passions of men. If
you make a man timid, you change him into a hare. If, on the contrary,
you drive him to ferocity, you make a tiger of him.
The wand of Circe is the power of fascination which woman possesses;
and the changing of the companions of Ulysses into hogs is not a story
peculiar to that time.
But no metamorphosis may be worked without destruction. To change a
hawk into a dove, one must first kill it, then cut it to pierces, so as
to destroy even the least trace of its first form, and then boil it in
the magic bath of Medea.
Observe how modern hierophants proceed in order to accomplish human
regeneration; how, for example, in the Catholic religion, they go to
work in order to change a man more or less weak and passionate into a
stoical missionary of the Society of Jesus.
There is the great secret of that venerable and terrible Order, always
misunderstood, often calumniated, and always sovereign.
Read attentively the book entitled, "The Exercises of St. Ignatius,"
and note with what magical power that man of genius operates the
realization of faith.
He orders his disciples to see, to touch, to smell, to taste invisible
things. He wishes that the senses should be exalted during prayer to
the point of voluntary hallucination. {273} You are meditating upon a
mystery of faith; St. Ignatius wishes, in the first place, that you
should create a place, dream of it, see it, touch it. If it is hell, he
gives you burning rocks to touch, he makes you swim in shadows thick as
pitch, he puts liquid sulphur on your tongue, he fills your nostrils
with an abominable stench, he shows you frightful tortures, and makes
you hear groans superhuman in their agony; he commands your will to
create all that by exercises obstinately persevered in. Every one
carries this out in his own fashion, but always in the way best suited
to impress him. It is not the hashish intoxication which was useful to
the knavery of the Old Man of the Mountain; it is a dream without
sleep, an hallucination without madness, a reasoned and willed vision,
a real creation of intelligence and faith. Thence-forward, when he
preaches, the Jesuit can say: "What we have seen with our eyes, what we
have heard with our ears, and what our hands have handled, that do we
declare unto you." The Jesuit thus trained is in communion with a
circle of wills exercised like his own; consequently each of the
fathers is as strong as the Society, and the Society is stronger than
the world.

CHAPTER II
HOW TO PRESERVE AND RENEW YOUTH --- THE SECRETS OF CAGLIOSTRO --- THE
POSSIBILITY OF RESURRECTION --- EXAMPLE OF WILLIAM POSTEL, CALLED THE
RESURRECTED --- STORY OF A WONDER-WORKING WORKMAN, ETC.
ONE knows that a sober, moderately busy, and perfectly regular life

usually prolongs existence; but in our opinion, {274} that is little
more than the prolongation of old age, and one has the right to ask
from the science which we profess other privileges and other secrets.
To be a long time young, or even to become young again, that is what
would appear desirable and precious to the majority of men. It is
possible? We shall examine the question.
The famous Count of Saint-Germain is dead, we do not doubt, but no one
ever saw him grow old. He appeared always of the age of forty years,
and at the time of his greatest celebrity, he pretended to be over
eighty.
Ninon de lEnclos, in her very old age, was still a young, beautiful
and seductive woman. She died without having grown old.
Desbarrolles, the celebrated palmist, has been for a long while for
everybody a man of thirty-five years. His birth certificate would speak
very differently if he dared to show it, but no one would believe it.
Cagliostro always appeared the same age. He pretended to possess not
only an elixir which gave to the old, for an instant, all the vigour of
youth; but he also prided himself on being able to operate physical
regeneration by means which we have detailed and analysed in our
"History of Magic."
Cagliostro and the Count of Saint-Germain attri buted the preservation
of their youth to the existence and use of the universal medicine, that
medicament uselessly sought by so many hermetists and alchemists.
An Initiate of the sixteenth century, the good and learned William
Postel, never pretended that he possessed the great arcanum of the
hermetic philosophy; and yet after having {275} been seen old and
broken, he reappeared with a bright complexion, without wrinkles, his
beard and hair black, his body agile and vigorous. His enemies
pretended that he roughed, and dyed his hair; for scoffers and false
savants must find some sort of explanation for the phenomena which they
do not understand.
The great magical means of preserving the youth of the body is to
prevent the soul from growing old by preserving preciously that
original freshness of sentiments and thoughts which the corrupt world
calls illusions, and which we shall call the primitive mirages of
eternal truth.
To believe in happiness upon earth, in friendship, in love, in a
maternal Providence which counts all our steps, and will reward all our
tears, is to be a perfect dupe, the corrupt world will say; it does not
see that it is itself who is the dupe, believing itself strong in
depriving itself of all the delights of the soul.
To believe in moral good is to possess that good: for this reason the
Saviour of the world promises the kingdom of heaven to those who should
make themselves like little children. What is childhood? It is the age
of faith. The child knows nothing yet of life; and thus he radiates
confident immortality. Is it possible for him to doubt the devotion,
the tenderness, the friendship, and the love of Providence when he is
in the arms of his mother?
Become children in heart, and you will remain young in body.
The realities of God and nature surpass infinitely in beauty and
goodness all the imagination of men. It is thus that the world-weary
are people who have never known how to be happy; and those who are
disillusioned prove by their dislikes {276} that they have only drunk
of muddy streams. To enjoy even the animal pleasures of life one must
have the moral sense; and those who calumniate existence have certainly
abused it.
High magic, as we have proved, leads man back to the laws of the purest
morality. Either he finds a thing holy or makes it holy, says an adept
--- "Vel sanctum invenit, vel sanctum facit;" because it makes us
understand that in order to be happy, even in this world, one must be
holy.
To be holy! that is easy to say; but how give ones self faith when one
no longer believes? How re-discover a taste for virtue in a heart faded
by vice?
One must have recourse to the four words of science: to know, to dare,
to will, and to keep silence.
One must still ones dislikes, study duty, and begin by practising it
as though one loved it.
You are an unbeliever, and you wish to make yourself a Christian?
Perform the exercises of a Christian, pray regularly, using the
Christian formulae; approach the sacraments as if you had faith, and
faith will come. That is the secret of the Jesuits, contained in the
Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.
By similar exercises, a fool, if he will it with perseverance, would
become a wise man.<
would become wise. --- WILLIAM BLAKE.>>
By changing the habits of the soul one certainly changes those of the
body; we have already said so, and we have explained the method.
What contri butes above all to age us by making us ugly? Hatred and
bitterness, the unfavourable judgments which {277} we make of others,
our rages of hurt vanity, and our ill-satisfied passions. A kindly and
gentle philosophy would avoid all these evils.
If we close our eyes to the defects of our neighbour, and only consider
his good qualities, we shall find good and benevolence everywhere. The
most perverse man has a good side to him, and softens when one knows
how to take him. If you had nothing in common with the vices of men,
you would not even perceive them. Friendship, and the devotions which
it inspires, are found even in prisons and in convict stations. The
horrible Lacenaire faithfully returned any money which had been lent to
him, and frequently acted with generosity and kindness. I have no doubt
that in the life of crime which Cartouche and Mandrin led there were
acts of virtue fit to draw tears from the eyes. There has never been
any one absolutely bad or absolutely good. "There is none good but
God," said the best of the Masters.
That quality in ourselves which we call zeal for virtue is often
nothing but a masterful secret self-love, a jealousy in disguise, and a
proud instinct of contradiction. "When we see manifest disorders and
scandalous sinners," say mystical theologians, "let us believe that God
is submitting them to greater tests than those with which He tries us,
that certainly, or at least very probably, we are not as good as they
are, and should do much worse in their place."
Peace! Peace! this is the supreme welfare of the soul, and it is to
give us this that Christ came to the world.
"Glory to God in the highest, peace upon earth, and good will toward
men!" cried the Angels of Heaven at the birth of the Saviour. {278}
The ancient fathers of Christianity counted an eighth deadly sin: it
was Sorrow.
In fact, to the true Christian even repentance is not a sorrow; it is a
consolation, a joy, and a triumph. "I wished evil, and I wish it no
more; I was dead and I am alive." The father of the Prodigal son has
killed the fatted calf because his son has returned. What can he do?
Tears and embarrassment, no doubt! but above all joy!
There is only one sad thing in the world, and that is sin and folly.
Since we are delivered, let us laugh and shout for joy, for we are
saved, and all those who loved us in their lives rejoice in heaven!
We all bear within ourselves a principle of death and a principle of
immortality. Death is the beast, and the beast produces always bestial
stupidity. God does not love fools, for his divine spirit is called the
spirit of intelligence. Stupidity expiates itself by suffering and
slavery. The stick is made for beasts.
Suffering is always a warning. So much the worse for him who does not
understand it! When Nature tightens the rein, it is that we are
swerving; when she plies the whip, it is that danger is imminent. Woe,
then, to him who does not reflect!
When we are ripe for death, we leave life without regret, and nothing
would make us take it back; but when death is premature, the soul
regrets life, and a clever thaumaturgist would be able to recall it to
the body. The sacred books indicate to us the proceeding which must be
employed in such a case. The Prophet Elisha and the Apostle St. Paul
employed it with success. The deceased must be magnetized {279} by
placing the feet on his feet, the hands on his hands, the mouth on his
mouth. Then concentrate the whole will for a long time, call to itself
the escaped soul, using all the loving thoughts and mental caresses of
which one is capable. If the operator inspires in that soul much
affection or great respect, if in the thought which he communicates
magnetically to it the thaumaturgist can persuade it that life is still
necessary to it, and that happy days are still in store for it below,
it will certainly return, and for the man of everyday science the
apparent death will have been only a lethargy.
It was after a lethargy of this kind that William Postel, recalled to
life by Mother Jeanne, reappeared with a new youth, and called himself
no longer anything but Postel the Resurrected, "Postellus restitutus."
In the year 1799, there was in the Faubourg St. Antoine, at Paris, a
blacksmith who gave himself out to be an adept of hermetic science. His
name was Leriche, and he passed for having performed miraculous cures
and even resurrections by the use of the universal medicine. A ballet
girl of the Opera, who believed in him, came one day to see him, and
said to him, weeping, that her lover had just died. M. Leriche went out
with her to the house of death. As he entered, a person who was going
out, said to him: "It is useless for you to go upstairs, he died six
hours ago." "Never mind," said the blacksmith, "since I am here I will
see him." He went upstairs, and found a corpse frozen in every part
except in the hollow of the stomach, where he thought that he still
felt a little heat. He had a big fire made, massaged his whole body
with hot napkins, rubbed him with the universal medicine dissolved in
spirit of wine. [His pretended universal medicine {280} must have been
a powder containing mercury analogous to the kermes<
black antimony sulphide with sodium carbonate solution. Used in gout
and rheumatism and some skin diseases on the continent, rarely in
England. --- TRANS.>> of the druggist.] Meanwhile the mistress of the
dead man wept and called him back to life with the most tender words.
After an hour and a half of these attentions, Leriche held a mirror
before the patients face, and found the glass slightly clouded. They
redoubled their efforts, and soon obtained a still better marked sign
of life. They then put him in a well warmed bed, and a few hours
afterwards he was entirely restored to life. The name of this person
was Candy. He lived from that time without ever being ill. In 1845 he
was still alive, and was living at Place du Chevalier du Guet, 6. He
would tell the story of his resurrection to any one who would listen to
him, and gave much occasion for laughter to the doctors and wiseacres
of his quarter. The good man consoled himself in the vein of Galileo,
and answered them: "You may laugh as much as you like. All I know is,
that the death certificate was signed and the burial licence made out;
eighteen hours later they were going to bury me, and here I am."

CHAPTER III
THE GRAND ARCANUM OF DEATH
WE often become sad in thinking that the most beautiful life must
finish, and the approach of the terrible unknown that one calls death
disgusts us with all the joys of existence.
Why be born, if one must live so little? Why bring up {281} with so
much care children who must die? Such is the question of human
ignorance in its most frequent and its saddest doubts.
This, too, is what the human embryo may vaguely ask itself at the
approach of that birth which is about to throw it into an unknown world
by stripping it of its protective envelope. Let us study the mystery of
birth, and we shall have the key of the great arcanum of death!
Thrown by the laws of Nature into the womb of a woman, the incarnated
spirit very slowly wakes, and creates for itself with effort organs
which will later be indispensable, but which as they grow increase its
discomfort in its present situation. The happiest period of the life of
the embryo is that when, like a chrysalis, it spreads around it the
membrane which serves it for refuge, and which swims with it in a
nourishing and preserving fluid. At that time it is free, and does not
suffer. It partakes of the universal life, and receives the imprint of
the memories of Nature which will later determine the configuration of
its body and the form of its features. That happy age may be called the
childhood of the embryo.
Adolescence follows; the human form becomes distinct, and its sex is
determined; a movement takes place in the maternal egg which resembles
the vague reveries of that age which follows upon childhood. The
placenta, which is the exterior and the real body of the foetus, feels
germinating in itself something unknown, which already tends to break
it and escape. The child then enters more distinctly into the life of
dreams. Its brain, acting as a mirror of that of its mother, reproduces
with so much force her imaginations, that it communicates their form to
its own limbs. Its mother is for it at {282} that time what God is for
us, a Providence unknown and invisible, to which it aspires to the
point of identifying itself with everything that she admires. It holds
to her, it lives by her, although it does not see her, and would not
even know how to understand her. If it was able to philosophize, it
would perhaps deny the personal existence and intelligence of that
mother which is for it as yet only a fatal prison and an apparatus of
preservation. Little by little, however, this servitude annoys it; it
twists itself, it suffers, it feels that its life is about to end. Then
comes an hour of anguish and convulsion; its bonds break; it feels that
it is about to fall into the gulf of the unknown. It is accomplished;
it falls, it is crushed with pain, a strange cold seizes it, it
breathes a last sigh which turns into a first cry; it is dead to
embryonic life, it is born to human life!
During embryonic life it seemed to it that the placenta was its body,
and it was in fact its special embryonic body, a body useless for
another life, a body which had to be thrown off as an unclean thing at
the moment of birth.
The body of our human life is like a second envelope, useless for the
third life, and for that reason we throw it aside at the moment of our
second birth.
Human life compared to heavenly life is veritably an embryo. When our
evil passions kill us, Nature miscarries, and we are born before our
time for eternity, which exposes us to that terrible dissolution which
St. John calls the second death.
According to the constant tradition of ecstatics, the abortions of
human life remain swimming in the terrestrial atmosphere which they are
unable to surmount, and which {283} little by little absorbs them and
drowns them. They have human form, but always lopped and imperfect; one
lacks a hand, another an arm, this one is nothing but a torso, and that
is a pale rolling head. They have been prevented from rising to heaven
by a wound received during human life, a moral wound which has caused a
physical deformity, and through this wound, little by little, all of
their existence leaks away.
Soon their moral soul will be naked, and in order to hide its shame by
making itself at all costs a new veil, it will be obliged to drag
itself into the outer darkness, and pass slowly through the dead sea,
the slumbering waters of ancient chaos. These wounded souls are the
larvae of the second formation of the embryo; they nourish their airy
bodies with a vapour of shed blood, and they fear the point of the
sword. Frequently they attach themselves to vicious men and live upon
their lives, as the embryo lives in its mothers womb. In these
circumstances, they are able to take the most horrible forms to
represent the frenzied desires of those who nourish them, and it is
these which appear under the figures of demons to the wretched
operators of the nameless works of black magic.
These larvae fear the light, above all the light of the mind. A flash
of intelligence is sufficient to destroy them as by a thunderbolt, and
hurl them into that Dead Sea which one must not confuse with the sea in
Palestine so-called. All that we reveal in this place belongs to the
tradition of seers, and can only stand before science in the name of
that exceptional philosophy, which Paracelsus called the philosophy of
sagacity, "philosophia sagax."

CHAPTER IV
ARCANUM ARCANORUM
THE great arcanum --- that is to say, the unutterable and inexplicable
secret --- is the absolute knowledge of good and of evil.
"When you have eaten the fruit of this tree, you will be as the gods,"
said the Serpent.
{Illustration on page 285 described:
This is a pentagram with point down and a white ring in the center. At
the ends of the points are black disks. The pentagram itself is black.
There are words in white on the Disks, from the upper right, clockwise:
"DESPOTISME", MENSONCE", "NEANT", "IGNORANCE", "ABSURDITE". There are
words in white in the points, same order: "Contre toute Justice",
"Contre toute verite", "Contre toute etre", "Contre toute science",
"Contre toute raison". In the central ring in three lines: "SATAN EST
LA HAINE".}
   "If you eat of it, you will die," replied Divine Wisdom.
   Thus good and evil bear fruit on one same tree, and from one same
   root.
   Good personified is God.
   Evil personified is the Devil.
   To know the secret or the formula of God is to be God.
   To know the secret or the formula of the Devil is to be the Devil.
   {285}
To wish to be at the same time God and Devil is to absorb in ones self
the most absolute antinomy, the two most strained contrary forces; it
is the wish to shut up in ones self an infinite antagonism.
It is to drink a poison which would extinguish the suns and consume the
worlds.<
poison generated by the churning of the Milk Ocean. (See Bhagavata
Purana Skandha VIII, Chaps. 5 - 12.) Levi therefore means in this
passage the exact contrary of what he pretends to mean. Otherwise this
"Be good, and you will be happy" chapter would scarcely deserve the
title "Arcanum Arcanorum." --- O.M.>>
{Illustration on page 286 described:
This is a pentagram with an upright isosceles triangle in the midst,
lower angles touching the two lower inner angles of the pentagram.
There are white disks touching the points from the outside. The
pentagram is white and circumscribed by a nimbus having five white
wedge-rays coming from the inner angles and opening at the outer edge
of the nimbus. The white disks have each a thin nimbus without rays and
the following words, clockwise from top: "CHARITE", "MYSTERE",
"SACRIFICE", "PROVIDENCE", "PERFECTION". The points have the following
text inside, set in script type, same order: "au dessus de tout etre",
"au dessus de toute science", "au dessus de toute justice", "au dessus
de toute raison", "au dessus de toute idee". In the central triangle
are three lines with the words: "DIEU EST
Yod-Heh-Vau-Heh-Aleph-Heh-Yod-Heh.}
It is to put on the consuming robe of Deianira.
It is to devote ones self to the promptest and most terrible of all
deaths.
Woe to him who wishes to know too much! For if excessive and rash
knowledge does not kill him it will make him mad. {286}
To eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, is to
associate evil with good, and assimilate the one to the other.
It is to cover the radiant countenance of Osiris with the mask of
Typhon.
It is to raise the sacred veil of Isis; it is to profane the sanctuary.
{Illustration on page 287 described:
This is in shape exactly the same as the illustration on page 282, save
that there are words in the five wedge rays and there is no triangle in
the center. Instead, the sides of the pentagram are extended as dotted
lines to form an inverse pentagon. The white disks have the following
text, clockwise from top: "INTELLIGENCE", "PROGRES", "AMOUR",
"SAGESSE", "LUMIERE". The points have the following text, same order:
"dans ses rapports avec l etre", "dans ses rapports avec la science",
"dans ses rapports avec la justice", "dans ses rapports avec la
raison", "dans ses rapports avec la verite". The rays have the
following text, clockwise from upper right: "Genie", "Enthousiasme",
"Harmonie", "Beaute", "Rectitude". The following words are in the
center, in three rows: "LESPRIT SAINT EST".}
The rash man who dares to look at the sun without protection becomes
blind, and from that moment for him the sun is black.
We are forbidden to say more on this subject; we shall conclude our
revelation by the figure of three pentacles.
These three stars will explain it sufficiently. They may be compared
with that which we have caused to be drawn at the head of our "History
of magic." By reuniting the four, one may arrive at the understanding
of the Great Arcanum of Arcana. {287}
It now remains for us to complete our work by giving the great key of
William Postel.
{Illustration on page 288 described:
This is bounded by a rectangle with height about twice width. The
center of the illustration is composed of a hexagram of two triangles,
points to top and bottom. This is circumscribed by a dark ring and
surmounts concentric rings inward from the outer one as white, dark,
white, dark --- at which point the inner angles of the hexagram begin.
The upper triangle of the hexagram is light and contains a bearded
human head and shoulders at top, feet with draped legs to the lower
points. The down-ward pointing triangle has the same in dark with a
matching dark figure. Surmounting the center of the hexagram and
completely obscuring bodies and arms is the classic Roman Agricultural
magical square of five lines: SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA, ROTAS. The
outer points of the hexagram extend lines radially to irregularly
divide the space to the rectangular border, upper and lower points
excepted. Above the upper point are the words "Keter Pole arctique" and
there is a nob at that spot with a line pulled diagonally upward to the
left by an eagle, facing counter clockwise. Above the eagle is the word
"NETSAH", to the right "L Air". The line from the upper right point has
"l Ete" above it and the figure of a winged lion below, facing outward
and progressing upward. The lion has "HOD" written to the right of its
head and vertically extended left foreleg, "Le Feu" below its tail and
downwardly extended right hind leg. The line from the lower right point
is below this figure, and "l Automne" is below this line. The line
from the upper left point has "les Printemps" written above it. Below
this is a bull, no wings and facing downward. "JESOD" is above the
bulls tail, and "La Terre" is below the head. Next below is the line
from the lower left point, with "l hiver" below that. Below the lower
point are the words "Pole antartique" and "L eau". There is a nob at
that spot, with a winged angel facing right and pulling the nob with a
diagonally downward line to the right. "MALCHVT" is written below the
Angel. The letters "HB:Yod" "HB:Heh " "HB:Vau " "HB:Heh " are picked
out by dots with three clustered radial dashes in or near the four
corners, starting with the upper right (clockwise or counter-clockwise
makes no difference). These dot-letters are the late Medieval style,
and either represent stars or fires. The Hebrew letters are formed by
straight line segments connecting the dots. The Hays have three dots
to the upper bar: ends and center with the dashes to the top. The
verticals on the Hays have three dots and join the upper bar to add a
fourth, with the three having their dashes facing outward. The Yod is
composed of two lines, dots at ends and intersection. Dashes at top
vertical, center dot dashes to the right and lower dot dashes to left.
The Vau has three dots, ends and center with dashes in same directions
as the Vau. The figure is completed by two lines of flourished symbols
at the bottom: Larger upper line looks like: 3 or h (bottom end of
corner Vau) Z P 7 R 3(or h) 4 (reversed), but is intended to represent
the seven planets starting with Saturn and ending with Jupiter.. The
smaller lower line looks like: M Z P Z 3(or h) N 7 M N 3(or h) F
(reversed) N, but is intended to represent the twelve signs of the
Zodiac. These symbols are somewhat doubtful in identity, owing to the
obscuration of using letter and number shapes to conceal the standard
Astrological symbols and to the jumbled sequence.}
This key is that of the Tarot. There are four suits, wands, caps,{sic}
swords, coins or pentacles, corresponding to the four cardinal points
of Heaven, and the four living creatures or symbolic signs and numbers
and letters formed in a circle; then the seven planetary signs, with
the indication of their repetition signified by the three colours, to
symbolize the natural world, the human world and the divine world,
whose {288} hieroglyphic emblems compose the twenty-one trumps of our
Tarot.
In the centre of the ring may be perceived the double triangle forming
the Star or Seal of Solomon.<
mis-identification. The seal is that of David in Jewish lore, Solomon
having the five-pointed star.>> It is the religious and metaphysical
triad analogous to the natural triad of universal generation in the
equilibrated substance.
Around the triangle is the cross which divides the circle into four
equal<
merge the six with the four.>> parts, and thus the symbols of religion
are united to the signs of geometry; faith completes science, and
science acknowledge faith.
By the aid of this key one can understand the universal symbolism of
the ancient world, and note its striking analogies with our dogmas. One
will thus recognize that the divine revelation is permanent in nature
and humanity. One will feel that Christianity only brought light and
heat into the universal temple by causing to descend therein the spirit
of charity, which is the Very Life of God Himself.

EPILOGUE
Thanks be unto thee, O my God, that thou hast called me to this
admirable light! Thou, the Supreme Intelligence and the Absolute Life
of those numbers and those forces which obey thee in order to people
the infinite with inexhaustible creation! Mathematics proves thee, the
harmonies of Nature proclaim thee, all forms as they pass by salute
thee and adore thee!
Abraham knew thee, Hermes divined thee, Pythagoras calculated thee,
Plato, in every dream of his genius, aspired to {289} thee; but only
one initiate, only one sage has revealed thee to the children of earth,
one alone could say of thee: "I and my Father are one." Glory then be
his, since all his glory is thine!
Thou knowest, O my Father, that he who writes these lines has struggled
much and suffered much; he has endured poverty, calumny, proscription,
prison, the forsaking of those whom he loved: --- and yet never did he
find himself unhappy, since truth and justice remained to him for
consolation!
Thou alone art holy, O God of true hearts and upright souls, and thou
knowest if ever I thought myself pure in thy sight! Like all men I have
been the plaything of human passions. At last I conquered them, or
rather thou has conquered them in me; and thou hast given me for a rest
the deep peace of those who have no goal and no ambition but Thyself.
I love humanity, because men, as far as they are not insensate, are
never wicked but through error or through weakness. Their natural
disposition is to love good, and it is through that love that thou hast
given them as a support in all their trials that they must sooner or
later be led back to the worship of justice by the love of truth.
Now let my books go where thy Providence shall send them! If they
contain the words of thy wisdom they will be stronger than oblivion.
If, on the contrary, they contain only errors, I know at least that my
love of justice and of truth will survive them, and that thus
immortality cannot fail to treasure the aspirations and wishes of my
soul hat thou didst create immortal! {290}

CONTENTS
PAGE
   TRANSLATORS NOTE . . . . . . v
   INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . vii
   PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . xi
   PART I (RELIGIOUS MYSTERIES) . . . . . . 1
   PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS . . . . . . 1
   FIRST ARTICLE . . . . . . . . 12
   SKETCH OF THE PROPHETIC THEOLOGY OF NUMBERS . . . 14
   ARTICLE II . . . . . . . . 72
   ARTICLE III . . . . . . . . 77
   ARTICLE IV . . . . . . . . 82
   ARTICLE V . . . . . . . . 89
   RESUME OF PART I . . . . . . . 91
   PART II (PHILOSOPHICAL MYSTERIES) . . . . . 98
   PART III (MYSTERIES OF NATURE). . . . . . 108
   FIRST BOOK CHAPTER I . . . . . . . 110
   CHAPTER II. . . . . . . 117
   CHAPTER III . . . . . . 127
   CHAPTER IV . . . . . . 226
   BOOK II CHAPTER I . . . . . . . 234
   CHAPTER II . . . . . . 239
   CHAPTER III . . . . . . 244
   CHAPTER IV . . . . . . 256
   PART IV (PRACTICAL SECRETS) INTRODUCTION . . . 267
   CHAPTER I . . . . . . 270
   CHAPTER II . . . . . . 274
   CHAPTER III . . . . . . 281
   CHAPTER IV . . . . . . 285
   EPILOGUE . . . . . . 289

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